CONFORMITY AND CREATIVITY

[Guest guest]

CONFORMITY AND CREATIVITY

—A Traveller on Earth

Greed is the basis of acceptance and obedience. All obedience is born out of

fear and desire for self-glorification. When greed takes the form of

ambition, it becomes respectable and virtuous. All virtue is the moral

drapery for greed and envy. Acceptance of authority and obedience to orders

mean conformity to a given procedure and pattern in order to achieve some

pre-conceived object. In it, there is promise for pleasure and plenty. All

means for pleasure become important because greed for pleasure and more

pleasure perpetuates the means. Auspiciousness does not lie in any day or

occasion but in self-glorification. There is no sacred day or sacred place,

our senses and valuation of things make for sanctity or sacrilege. This

valuation is ever-changing and clinging to predetermined valuation brings in

sorrow and misery. Conformity is ever to the past and to the predetermined.

The sense of emptiness like hunger breeds greed and any gratification of

greed enhances the possibility of intensive furtherance of both.

It was called a very auspicious day and people who would otherwise indulge

in excesses of food were observing fast, some acute and some moderate, some

starving and some changing one variety of food for the other. It was a day

of prayers and of recitation of ancient rhythmic poetry describing the

greatness of some deity and the utter dependence on it of the human life.

People assembled at holy places and held religious gatherings, sacrifices in

which auspicious and so-called meritorious food was burnt and turned to

ashes accompanied by hymns to the All-High, while dogs and orphans watched

by, loitering here end there with hungry look; and searching a nook for

whom really charity was necessary

All calculated action is never meritorious. All traditional valuation of

action is conformity to the greed of keeping the social order, which is

inequality, chaos and disorder, a slave to the needs of the vested

interests.

Why do you say "yes" to so many influences on your mind? Why should we obey

tradition? Why do we—you and me, accept the way of behaviour, the words, the

languages, the phrases, the relationships and their commitments of duty and

devotion, why, do we honour things which we do not understand? Why do we

adopt methods everywhere in life—may they be in the calculation of figures

or in the manners of eating food?

We want security and smooth-going life. Do we not want to be assured that

after doing certain action, certain benefits would come about? Can we not

see the inherent principle of reward and punishment dangled before our

conceptual faculty to drive us to accept mc-des of behaviour, patterns of

relationship and manners of social life?

When one accepts tradition because he sees it to be convenient and connives

at the falsehood of accepted norms, he ceases to be a creative individual, a

real human being. He only happens to be a spare part of the social

machinery, and can never break the bondages he has created and built up

around himself.

The network of tradition is self-sustaining. Any further addition to the

steps in the method or system of action or thought only strengthens the hold

and grip of the fear, the greed to achieve success, happiness, pleasures and

plenty through it, and therefore a creative individual has nothing

whatsoever to do with this social set-up, this convenient approach to

relationship, the family bondage the bondage of duty towards parents, the

brotherliness within the nasty self-enclosing communal feeling, the stagnant

stinking storehouse of traditional pride and prosperity, and he can never

rely on his reactions born out of need to be well-known amongst the pegs

around him. He can never act from the background of social status,

prejudices and privileges. He can never think or feel from the environmental

influences.

Conformity to the social morality and political or economic pattern is the

way of the mediocre, the way of yes-men, the misery of masses, who create a

projection of their yearnings and call him their leader. A projection of a

mediocre mind can never create a wise and farseeing leader and therefore

creative individual is never the leader of the masses. He has nothing to do

with them on the level of relationship in any form. He is completely

individual and therefore cannot take part in any happenings around him,

either auspicious or obnoxious, either traditionally sanctioned or

revolutionary and reactive.

Conformity is death and the domination of the matter, the thought-matter and

the feeling-matter and the body-matter. Conformity o f the individual to the

masses is therefore the total destruction of creativity and divinity. All

social structures are limited by desires on mass-scale and a sub-conscious

fear of the new streaks of light. Society is ever baffled by the new and the

creative; Any system when crystallised becomes a haphazard approximation to

the flow of life and therefore always falls short of the extraordinary

swiftness, the ever-freshness of the creative spirit.

(Adopted from Sri SaiLeela Special Issue 1973)