Karmayogi
February 1979
Law is described as the codified public conscience. Public conscience cannot be so high as private conscience. Only those laws that have the sanction of public conscience can last long in a community. Between law and private conscience there are grades of ‘legal’ forces of the community in the shape of custom, convention and usage. In India the exalted DHARMA rules the society. This is a wider spiritual term based on swadharma, nature of one’s self. Dharma can, by extension, be called the ‘conscience’ of the national soul.
Every time the clan expanded into a wider community and that later into a nationality the inner growth also expressed itself into an outer law. Each society and nationality gave a law unto itself and the effectivity of that law depends upon its true relation to the inner growth.
We live in a period where Nations and Nationalities have happily and harmoniously come into existence and are cohesive in themselves. Each nation – either Parliamentary Democracy or Monarchy or Proletarian Democracy – has given itself a system of jurisprudence, a judiciary which seem to be in some harmony with the national life. Internationalism was mooted since the League of Nations but nothing more material than the UNO has come into existence. But the future is for a wider entity than the nation, perhaps all humanity. Presently the common bonds forged in sports, science, trade, communication, preservation of atmospheric purity provide a skeletal basis for the external unity of mankind. In spirit all men and their souls belong to ONE mighty SPIRIT and this is the principle of Spiritual Oneness of Sri Aurobindo. Between the deep truth of spiritual oneness and the broad outlines of unity sports, science, …. etc., provide these is an area of closer legal existence of Mankind. A contribution in this field falls into the jurisdiction of jurists. A new legal system reflecting the evolving human unity must be created. Or the common legal basis of all the existing systems viz. Parliamentary, Authoritarian, Monarchial must be brought together under one banner. The former will be creative whereas the latter will only be an attempt at a scaffold for further creation.
As each level of law is integrated at its level of functioning with the private conscience at the depth and public conscience at the surface, the new legal system must be integrated at its depth with the principles of spiritual oneness and on the surface with the aspirations of mankind for a peaceful (non-war oriented) living of trade, science and life on a planet whose existence is clean and clear. To start with an examination of each system (Democracy, Authoritarian, etc.) will supply the common legal basis. This will, when gathered, be a clumsy assortment. But at the same time the deeper common layer will be seen. If to this common layer the outer extension to life and the inner extension to spirit can be provided, the first draft will emerge.
It will truly be a contribution to world unity on the plane of law