Great Devotees of Lord Siva 68B

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Om Namah Sivaya Chenna Basava Man thinks himself free because he is conscious of his volitions and desires and ignorant of the causes by which he is led to wish and desire. Every instinct is a desire developed by nature to preserve the

individual or rather the species. Pleasure and pain are the satisfaction or the hindrance of an instinct, they are not the causes of our desires but they are results. We do not desire things because they give us pleasure, but they give us pleasure because we desire them. The necessities of survival determine instinct, instinct determines desire and desire determines thought and action. In ethics Chennavasava inclines towards determinism. In one sense all education presupposes determinism and pours into the open mind of youth a store of prohibitions which are expected to participate in determining conduct. Determinism makes for a better moral life, it teaches us not to despise or ridicule any one, and though we punish miscreants it will be without hate; we forgive them because they know not what they do. Determinism teaches us to bear and forbear, to remember that all things follow by the eternal decrees of God. Perhaps it will even teach us the intellectual love of God

whereby we shall accept the laws of nature gladly and find our fulfillment within her limitations. So grounded in calm knowledge he rises from the fretful pleasures of passion to the high serenity of contemplation which sees all things as parts of an eternal order and development. He learns to smile in the face of the inevitable and whether he comes into his own now or in a thousand years he sits calm and collected. He learns that God is no capricious personality absorbed in the private affairs of his devotees, but the invariable sustaining order of the universe. So the philosophy of Golden Mean teaches us to say yea to life and even to death? It calms our fretted egos with its large perspective; it reconciles is to the limitations within which our purposes must be circumscribed. It may lead to resignation but it is also the indispensable basis of all wisdom and of all strength. The principles of the Golden Mean are

simple, clear and intelligent. First of all the Golden demands that we should have enlightened faith in the intelligent Being which is the source and origin of all things. God is the immanent and not the extraneous cause of all things. All is in God, all lives and moves in God. If this is so the universal law of nature and the eternal decrees of God are one and the same thing. God is the causal chain, the underlying condition of all thing, the law and structure of the world. This concrete universe of modes and things is to God as a bridge is to its structure. The world is upheld by the will of God. The will of God and the laws of nature being one and the same reality diversely phrased, it follows that all events are the operation of invariable laws, and not the whim and caprice of an irresponsible autocrat seated in the stars. The world is not a design but a determinism in the sense that the Will of God determines the process of the world. As the will expresses itself in

the laws of nature, the laws of nature can be mastered not by defiance but by obedience. This obedient, this reverent attitude towards God and nature is what constitutes enlightened faith. The second basic principle of Golden mean is non-violence. Violence in any shape or form cannot lead to any kind of lasting peace and socio-economic reconstruction. True democracy and real growth of human personality are possible only in a non-violent society. In order to preserve the purity of the end, the means employed towards its attainment must be equally pure. That is why Golden Mean maintains that even a socialist society should be established through non-violence and not through a bloody revolution. The Third basic principle of Golden Mean is the dignity and sanctity of manual labour. To Chennabasava labour is the law of nature and its violation is the cause of economic poverty and physical unfitness.

Chennabasava not only underlined the necessity and desirability of physical labour only on moral and psychological grounds, but he was anxious to strike at the root of economic exploitation by insisting on every one becoming as self-sufficient as possible. But if we have almost self-sufficient village communities in which every one works for his or her living on a co-operative basis, there will be almost no room for exploitation. Sivaya

Namah

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