THE human mind is not only going through experiences but is constantly evaluating them. Some experiences are regarded as agreeable and some disagreeable; some experiences Evaluation of experience through opposites are found to bring happiness and some suffering; some experiences are received as being pleasant and some unpleasant; some experiences are apprehended as restricting the life of man and some as leading it towards fullness and freedom; and some experiences are looked upon as being good and some bad. These are the opposites created by human imagination when it is meeting life with a particular point of view.
Man’s conception of what is acceptable or unacceptable goes on evolving and changing according to the nature of desires which happen to be dominant at any particular moment. Acceptable and unacceptable But, as long as there is any kind of desire in his mind, he is impelled to appraise his experience in relation to that desire and divide it into two parts, the one contributing towards its fulfillment and therefore acceptable, and the other tending to prevent its fulfillment and therefore unacceptable. Instead of meeting life and all that it brings without expectation, entanglement or shirking, the
mind creates a standard whereby it divides life into opposites, one of which is regarded as acceptable and the other as not acceptable.
Of the opposites created by the human mind the division between good and bad is spiritually most significant. It is based upon man’s desire to be free from the limitation of all desires. Even good is relative to desire Those experiences and actions which increase the fetters of desire are bad, and those experiences and actions which tend to emancipate the mind from limiting desires are good. Since good experiences and actions also exist in relation to desire, they also bind in the same way as do bad experiences and actions. All binding can truly disappear only when all desires disappear; therefore true freedom comes when good and bad balance each other and become so merged into each other that they leave no room for any choice by the limited self of desire.
When human consciousness is fully developed we already find in it a preponderance of bad elements, since at the sub-human stages of evolution consciousness has been chiefly operating under limiting tendencies like lust, greed and anger. Man starts with animal sanskaras The experiences and actions created and sustained by such ego-centred tendencies have left their imprints on the developing mind and the mind has stored these imprints in the same manner as film records the movement of actors. It is therefore easy to be bad and difficult to be good. Animal life, from which human consciousness emerges, is mostly determined by animal lust, animal greed and animal anger, though some animals do at times develop the good qualities of self-sacrifice, love and patience. If all the accumulated animal sanskaras had been bad and none good, the appearance of good
