When Love has been attained, social customs are not to be scorned, but they are to be performed (giving up the fruits).
There is a great tendency when the mind has become free to forget the guiding forms that are necessary for others, who are still bound by prejudices, ignorance or selfishness. An opinion tends to form that it is hypocritical to conform outwardly where inwardly we recognise only a custom or a form, and that we can forcibly tear off the bandages from the eyes of others. There is a difference in the limitation of Truth which still, however, directs people in the right direction, and a distortion or perversion. Truth is limited for every manifested being, and it is always only a question of degree. Out of this subtle question has arisen a host of intellectual quibbles, and amongst them that of justifying the means by the end. We have the advocate of breaking down everything he has passed beyond himself, and his rival who maintains that the motive alone counts and that methods are nothing, that any false hope can be nurtured in another, any deception practised if it leads the votary in the right direction.
The answer to all this is that there are certain forms and observances which lead to less disguised truths, which make a ladder by the steps of which men may mount, and there are other methods again which are extremely indirect or opposite in direction to the above. Of these two sets, a man should follow in observance what he deems to lead in the right direction, and oppose all that is contrary to it or extremely indirect. For him who has “gone beyond the opposites,” “good and evil” are mere names; yet if he, whilst living amongst men, did not conform to what they can see as good and avoid what they can see as evil, he would be kicking down the long ladder by which he himself, through ages of faithful recognition and belief in good and evil, had mounted.
There is a great tendency when the mind has become free to forget the guiding forms that are necessary for others, who are still bound by prejudices, ignorance or selfishness. An opinion tends to form that it is hypocritical to conform outwardly where inwardly we recognise only a custom or a form, and that we can forcibly tear off the bandages from the eyes of others. There is a difference in the limitation of Truth which still, however, directs people in the right direction, and a distortion or perversion. Truth is limited for every manifested being, and it is always only a question of degree. Out of this subtle question has arisen a host of intellectual quibbles, and amongst them that of justifying the means by the end. We have the advocate of breaking down everything he has passed beyond himself, and his rival who maintains that the motive alone counts and that methods are nothing, that any false hope can be nurtured in another, any deception practised if it leads the votary in the right direction.
The answer to all this is that there are certain forms and observances which lead to less disguised truths, which make a ladder by the steps of which men may mount, and there are other methods again which are extremely indirect or opposite in direction to the above. Of these two sets, a man should follow in observance what he deems to lead in the right direction, and oppose all that is contrary to it or extremely indirect. For him who has “gone beyond the opposites,” “good and evil” are mere names; yet if he, whilst living amongst men, did not conform to what they can see as good and avoid what they can see as evil, he would be kicking down the long ladder by which he himself, through ages of faithful recognition and belief in good and evil, had mounted.