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THE NEW MORALITY
There is much talk today about "the new morality," but the change from the "old" to the "new" morality is interpreted in a confused and often irrelevant manner. What usually impresses people is merely the fact that some kinds of actions which were not allowed and considered immoral are now regarded as permissible and in some cases valuable and truly constructive. The present revolution in interpersonal and social behavior is not, however, what makes the morality new. The new morality does not merely extend the permissibility of actions; it means, if it is at all significant, a change of attitude toward the concept of morality itself.
The "old" traditional idea of morality refers to the performance of actions: there is a "right" and a "wrong" way of acting. The term, right, comes from the Sanskrit word rita, which refers to the correct performance of actions in a ritual or ceremony; and in old India practically every act of daily living was involved in some kind of ritual. A divine Law-giver, Manu, was believed to have precisely defined how nearly every human action had to be performed; and this established the only "right" way to act in all circumstances. At the root of our Western civilization we find also God's Ten Commandments revealed to Moses, and the Hebrew society was, like the Hindu, rigidly ritualistic — with this very basic difference that in India the most valued human being was the Sannyasi, or Holy Man, who considered himself, and was accepted as being, beyond all the laws of caste and beyond the need to conform to most of the ritual of organized cults — a paradoxical situation.
In our Christian tradition morality has remained mainly identified with the performance or nonperformance of specific actions, but an emotional quality was introduced into the nature of the moral action around the time of the birth of Christianity and, in India, of the development of Northern Mahayana Buddhism. It became not only the "right" action, but the "good" action. The inner motive for the action, the quality of the feeling within the person performing it and this person's state of mind or consciousness, entered into the picture. These elements may have been present in earlier days in the concept of ritualistic living, but around the first century B.C. they increased greatly in importance, at least in theoretical importance.
If we are to speak significantly of a "new" morality we have to refer to an attitude to life according to which the moral value of any action depends almost exclusively on the conscious meaning this action has for the individual performing it. According to such an attitude morality refers to consciousness, rather than to action. It is how an individual person sees and relates himself in thought and feeling to the action which makes it moral or immoral, good or bad — and to use terms emphasized by existentialist philosophers, authentic or unauthentic.
An authentic action is one which expresses the "truth of being" of an individual person — i.e., his fundamental nature, his dharma. The impulse to act in many cases arises "spontaneously" (vis. "of its own"); in any case it is not dictated or even deeply influenced by social custom, by parental wishes, by what has been impressed upon the conscious and/or unconscious mind by collective pressures, fear of social retaliation or religious sanctions. The action may fit in with social-cultural values, but if so this should not be due to a blind or compulsive kind of conformism, but to the conscious, objective and enlightened acceptation of such values. If a boy follows his father's profession just because it is his father's, and custom, financial convenience or personal comfort dictate this course of action, this is not an authentic choice. It may not be authentic either, if the child refuses to follow in his father's foot-steps just because he is led by the example of many youths of his age to rebel in principle against what his parents wish.
This concept of "authenticity" was well understood, at least within certain social limits, in ancient India, where much was said concerning individual "acts of truth." In his remarkable book PHILOSOPHIES OF INDIA, Heinrich Zimmer writes the following- (page 160-162) quoting at first from the Bhagavad-Gita (3:35):
"Better is one's own dharma, though imperfectly performed, than the dharma of another well performed. Better is death in the performance of one's own dharma: the dharma of another is fraught with peril." There exists in India an ancient belief that the one who has enacted his own dharma without a single fault throughout the whole of his life can work magic by the simple act of calling that fact to witness. This is known as making an 'Act of Truth.' The dharma need not be that of the highest Brahman caste or even of the decent and respectable classes of the human community. In every dharma, Brahman, the Holy Power, is present.
"The story is told, for example, of a time when the righteous king Asoka, greatest of the great North Indian dynasty of the Mauryas, stood in the city of Pataliputra, surrounded by city folk and country folk, by his ministers and his army and his councilors, with the Ganges flowing by, filled up by freshets, level with the banks, full to the brim, five hundred leagues in length, a league in breadth. Beholding the river, he said to his ministers, 'is there anyone who can make this mighty Ganges flow back upstream?' To which the ministers replied, 'That is a hard matter, your Majesty.'
"Now there stood on that very river bank an old courtesan named Bindumati, and when she heard the king's question she said, 'As for me, I am a courtesan in the city of Pataliputra. I live by my beauty; my means of subsistence is the lowest. Let the King but behold my Act of Truth.' And she performed an Act of Truth. The instant she performed her Act of Truth that mighty Ganges flowed back upstream with a roar, in the sight of all that mighty throng.
"When the king heard the roar caused by the movement of the whirlpools and the waves of the might Ganges, he was astonished, 'How comes it that this mighty Ganges is flowing back upstream?' 'Your Majesty, the courtesan Bindumati heard your words, and performed an Act of Truth. It is because of her Act of Truth that the mighty Ganges is flowing backwards.'
"His heart palpitating with excitement, the king himself went posthaste and asked the courtesan, 'Is it true, as they say, that you, by an Act of Truth, have made this river Ganges flow back upstream?' 'Yes, your Majesty.' — Said the king, 'You have power to do such a thing as this! Who, indeed, unless he were stark mad, would pay" any attention to what you say? By what power have you caused this mighty Ganges to flow back upstream?' Said the courtesan, 'By the Power of Truth, your Majesty, have I caused this mighty Ganges to flow back upstream.'
"Said the king, 'You possess the Power of Truth! You, a thief, a cheat, corrupt, cleft in twain, vicious, a wicked old sinner who have broken the bounds of morality and live on the plunder of fools! It is true, your Majesty; I am what you say. But even I, wicked woman that I am, possess an Act of Truth by means of which, should I so desire, I could turn the world of men and the world of gods upside down.' Said the king, 'But what is this Act of Truth? Pray enlighten me.'
'Your Majesty, whosoever gives me money, be he a Kshatriya or a Brahman or a Vaisya or a Sudra or of any other caste soever, I treat them all exactly alike. If he be a Kshatriya, I make no distinction in his favor. If he be a Sudra, I despise him not. Free alike from fawning and contempt, I serve the owner of the money. This, your Majesty, is the Act of Truth by which I caused the mighty Ganges to flow back upstream.' "
This story, translated from an old Hindu text, presents in an extreme form, a very significant idea. The concept of total absorption in the specific function of a caste belongs to the past, but if we translate this ideal in terms of our modern individualism we can see what the "Act of Truth" can mean today in relation to the behavior of an individual person. The Act of Truth is the perfectly authentic action. Astrologically speaking, it is the act in and through which the total character and implications of a birth-chart are expressed, at the time when such an expression is attuned to the prevailing progressions and transits. This act carries the "Signature" of the whole-person. It is a "moral" act in terms of the new morality, whether or not it conforms to custom or a collective concept of ethics.
I spoke of morality, and now I mention the word, ethics. One may consider the two words identical in meaning, or one may restrict their use to specific levels of meaning. Perhaps arbitrarily I am using here the words, ethics and ethical, with reference to the traditional approach of a particular society or culture: the ethos of a culture identifies the basic character of its collective mentality and behavior or "way of life." On the other hand, I mean by morality the working out of ideals of conduct in the life of individual persons, and also the exteriorization of an ideal way of reacting and responding to the many types of everyday encounters and challenges.
The "new morality" actually has its roots in the ideals of Christianity, Mahayana Buddhism, and in its purest form Islam, for these religions are, in principle at least, "universal" religions. They are universal in that they do not proclaim ethics that are the products of particular cultures and of collective ways of life. They bring the individual person directly in relation to what in him is essentially and universally "human." In actual fact, of course, these religions have not been true to their ideals; they have become "culturalized" and particularized. Ethics of race, nation, social class have been developed, and religious organizations have introduced intermediaries between the spiritual ideal and the concrete social facts. This is especially true of Christianity with its warring Churches, its priests, its sacraments, and its involvement in political and cultural - educational matters.
The Christian attitude toward sex and marriage, toward Church dignitaries or the Bible, toward a variety of "sins," and toward such procedural matters as the celibacy of priests, birth-control, etc., refers to the realm of collective ethics, but not to that of morality, as I defined this term. Ethical concepts and rules can be enforced by religious or social sanctions. Morality refers to the individual's capacity to live up to the ideal he has of his relationship to human nature and human possibilities of conscious spiritual development and, one may say also, to a God Who is truly universal and Who therefore cannot possibly take sides in human conflicts.
This discussion has a great deal of relevance to the defining of the meaning of a birth-chart in humanistic astrology, because, as I have stated repeatedly, a birth-chart is the whole universe focused at a particular point in time and space. It symbolizes therefore the direct relationship of a particular person to the most universal values he may be able to conceive and to exteriorize in acts. It defines the individual's relationship not to a particular society, culture or tradition but to God. It is God's idea of him and of what he can achieve as an individual. In the celestial code of astrological symbolism it gives to this individual a set of instructions. It symbolizes at the level of individual existence the meeting of Moses and God on Mt. Sinai in which God gave to Moses His laws — laws not for the collectivity of a people, but for an individual person.
As the individual lives consciously and deliberately in terms of this set of instructions, as he "performs yoga" with the celestial Message, his life becomes a constant "Act of Truth" — an authentic life, a self-actualizing life.
