After an intense wave of atheism immediately following the war, we now witness a surge of religious worship in Tamil Nadu. Perhaps it is an All-India phenomenon. Hundreds of temples have been consecrated and renovated. Thousands throng the erstwhile deserted temples. As a rule, the income of the temples from the devotee visitors has been steadily increasing. House construction is being presided over by vaastu. Alongside we see the deterioration of moral standards all over the country. Why does evil flourish while everywhere people turn to God? When it rains copiously, crops grow abundantly. Simultaneously weeds also grow in over abundance. To God, man-made crops and the jungle growth are of equal importance. Perhaps God works through Truth as well as evil. At least that is what Sri Aurobindo says.
How then do we meet the growing evil in life? It is inescapable. It will meet you at many points in life. The rapid growth of good at some time or other overcomes the growing evil. Or the evil is weeded out in time. Maybe the growth of evil will be stunted. These are the ways Nature has been functioning all along. Is there no better alternative than what Nature offers us? Evil flourishes only as long as EGO survives. If man comes forward to shed his ego, it will end the existence of evil. Sri Aurobindo says there is no evil created. It is only ego that sees GOOD as evil. This is a philosophy the world has not heard of so far. How do we understand it and accept it? My answer is we must understand it as we understand a new technology and accept it as we assimilate the new technology.
The world has always been skeptical of new inventions and sometimes stiffly opposed them. But finally no new technology has ever been rejected. Evil does not exist even as karma does not exist. They have power over us only when we believe in them. When we withdraw our support to them, they cannot survive. In our daily practice, when we invoke the Spirit, the evil moves away from its path. Once we invoke the Spirit we no longer meet with evil as we do now. Invocation of the Spirit can solve the problem of evil for the Individual. For the collective we have first to deal with it philosophically before we devise our method in practice.