But, this permission and concession given to the desires to fulfil themselves is to be conditioned by a great rule or law, called Dharma. If Dharma, the principle of the righteousness of the law, does not regulate the operation of desires, they cease to be aids in the movement of the spirit towards God. Regulated desire is not an obstacle. It is, rather, the dynamo that pumps energy into the human system and enables man to live a healthy life of constructive activity. Waters of a river, which are accumulated by the construction of a dam, can be either utilised for the beneficial purpose of agriculture, or they may burst forth into a destructive activity, damaging villages and killing people. Even so with desires, which are like flowing rivers, and which get dammed up when they are bottled inside the individuality of a man. They are intended for focussing the mind and concentration of it for driving the individual towards the Universal Reality, and not to be dissipated in any grossly outward movement of the urge for unmitigated indulgence of a spatio-temporal character.

Dharma is law, righteousness, virtue, or a regulative principle, which harmonises everything with everything else. The individual cannot escape a little of selfishness because of the affirmation of the individuality which is turbulent. There is an urge within everyone to maintain one's own self to the detriment of others, a form which desire takes when it is concentrated within the body and ignores the presence of other individuals of a similar nature. Dharma, or law, insists that desire can be fulfilled, but not to the disadvantage of others who also exist in this world, and who too have a similar permission to fulfil their desires. "Do unto others as you would be done by. Do not do to others what you would not like to be done to yourself." If one wishes that everything should belong to oneself, everyone else also can entertain a similar wish. If everyone wishes to have everything for one's own self, what would be the result? There would be chaos and destruction. Law is the principle of cooperation in life as against competition, conflict, battle and war. It is the concession which each individual is expected to make in respect of every other individual in the world, because the world is a 'Kingdom of Ends,' and not a restless flow of 'means' only. Each individual has a status of his own, or her own, or its own, and no individual is a means to another individual. Exploitation is not permitted by the very structure of the world. No one can utilise another for one's own purpose, or satisfaction. Desire, whatever be its nature, has a peculiar trait of exploiting others. Whenever a desire arises in man, he has a subtle inkling to utilise others for the fulfilment of that impulse. And when the desire becomes intense, violent, and takes the form of an unruly passion, it may wholly ignore the welfare of others, and may even tend towards the other form of it, namely a desire to destroy. To prevent such a possible catastrophe, a regimentation has to be introduced into one's life.

In the Bhagavadgita, there is a reference to this principle of the permission given for the fulfilment of desire provided it is not contrary to law: Dharmaviruddho bhuteshu kamosmi, "I am that desire in man which is not against the operation of law, which is in conformity with the principle of righteousness." What is righteousness? What is law, and what is Dharma, which has to condition desire, and in harmony with which desire is permissible in life? In the Veda, there are two significant terms used: Satya and Rita. Satya is the law of the Absolute. Rita is the very same law operating in the cosmos as a regulative principle, immanent in all things. And every law that man can think of in his mind is a fraction of this cosmic Law which is rooted in the integrality of the Universal. There is a necessity to introduce a system of coherence among the visible particulars, so that they form a harmonious whole, a hierarchy of completeness, and not a mess of jarring notes without any relation among themselves. The individuals in the cosmos are not really scattered particulars. They are integral parts of a whole, orderly arranged in an hierarchical fashion, controlled by the supreme indivisibility of God's perfection. The universality of God is the reason behind the need to implement a law of harmony among the individualities in the world. Law exists because God exists, and law is the way in which God's Indivisible Being manifests Itself through space and time. It is the cementing factor in life, bringing together isolated forms into an integral whole.

The mandate, or the imperative, that man has to fulfil the righteousness of the law is also a part of the requirement of all life. It is not true that life consists merely in the fulfilment of material needs and the acquirement of vital satisfaction. Yes, they are permitted, no doubt. But, it is a permission under the law operating everywhere, uniformly. Artha, Kama, Dharma, are the three terms signifying the three facets of the approach of man to God in terms of his relationship in the universe and in human society. The well-graduated order of life as the student (Brahmacharin), householder (Grihastha), recluse (Vanaprastha), and the super-individual sage (Sannyasin), is the scientific formulation of the way in which human impulses are to be trained for a dedication of time to eternity.

Ultimately, the supreme aim of life is not the fulfilment of any desire, but the attainment of liberation, Moksha. The evolutionary process of the cosmos is the movement of all phenomena towards Self realisation, not of any given individual, but of all things uniformly. It is the Self realisation of the universe. The universe is struggling to become aware of its own existence as a total whole. The cosmos is endeavouring to regain its integrality in an all-inclusive Self awareness. Towards this end, every part of it is moving, like the parts of a machine when it is operating. The goal of life is the attainment of God, the realisation of the Absolute, the unity of the individual with the cosmos. This is Moksha. This is the final aim of all life. The other aims, viz., Artha, Kama and Dharma, are necessary contributory factors, the other building faces of this glorious consummation. Here, one has to strike a note of caution. When it is said that Moksha is the goal of life, one is likely, suddenly, to be transported to a peculiar kind of thinking that the aim is beyond this world, and that it is not in this world. This is a subtle error that can creep into the intelligence of man on account of a temporal feature which is predominant in the very nature of human thinking. When one speaks of the liberation of the soul and the union of the individual in the Godhead, one may imagine that it is an 'other-worldly' affair. To remove this wrong notion, it has been reiterated that Artha and Kama form part of the means to be adopted for the realisation of the ideal. The world is transmuted, not denied, in the Infinite.

Religions, many a time, picture God as an extra-cosmic creator. This concept of God as transcendent has resulted often in a bifurcation of life into the religious and the secular. Life is condemned either as a devilish attraction for matter and flesh, a work of Satan, or an illusion which has to be shunned with the force of will, because Nirvana is the goal of life. Moksha is the aim of existence. Man tries to withdraw from the realities of the physical forms of life and turn an introvert who cannot recognise the immanence of God in the temporal process, but can adore only His transcendence. The culture of India is superb in this sense that it has kept in mind the possibility of man committing this error in his practice of religion. God is transcendent, yes, because He is above space and time. But He is also immanent because the call of God, the presence of the Absolute, is reverberating through the medium of space and time. God is not merely outside man; He is also within. God is not only Brahman, The All, but also the Atman, the Self; Moksha is not a world above, a heaven beyond, and is not an after-death achievement. It is an experience here and now, spaceless and timeless. Life has to be lived in such a way that right from the lowest physical level up to the final spiritual state, it becomes a movement of consciousness through its gradual evolutionary unfoldment into perfection.

Ashramas: The Stages of Life

Together with this concept of the Purusharthas - Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha - the ancients conceived a formula to regulate the life of the individual by implementing a system called the Ashramas, or stages of life: Brahmacharya, Garhasthya, Vanaprastha, and Sannyasa. Man has to pass through these stages in order that he may become a complete person, mature wholly. No stage of life can be ignored as an unnecessary or an irrelevant intrusion. Just as Artha, Kama, Dharma, Moksha are equally important in their own contexts, though Moksha is the final goal, the four stages are all equally necessary. These Ashramas are the ways of living by which the four aims of life can be fulfilled in a healthy manner of self fulfilment.

Brahmacharya is the stage of studentship, of study under a Guru. It is the life of a scholar when he undergoes education in the knowledge of life, in its various manifestations of forms. Often, Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha, the four aims of life, have been correspondingly related to the four stages. There is some sort of a relevance in this comparison; yet, they cannot be literally detailed in this manner, because it is held that, while in the stage of Brahmacharya one accumulates Dharma, while in the life of the Grihastha one fulfils the needs of Artha and Kama, and in the disciplines of Vanaprastha and Sannyasa one works for Moksha, it is also true that the four get blended into an inseparable whole, and the four stages of life are a graduated growth into full maturity. There is no comparison possible of one with the other. Orientalists and thinkers have not infrequently thought that Indian philosophy is a doctrine of world-negation. Far from it is the truth, as could be seen with a clearer insight. The introduction of the system of Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha as constituting all life is the proof of it. The necessity felt to induct these stages through which everyone has to pass logically is a demonstration of the Indian genius. India's culture never held that negation is the law of life; for it fulfilment is a state that has to be reached by working through the media of other disciplinary processes which are equally important. It would be odious to compare one stage with another, imagining that one is superior or inferior to the other. The stages of evolution do not brook comparison. Each stage becomes as important as any other, when one finds oneself in it. Religion, indeed, is the whole of life. It is an inward attunement of oneself with the cosmic requirement. The inwardness, being constituted of the different layers of personality, has to be taken into consideration in all its degrees when one lives a religious life. The inwardness is of a graded form. There is no sudden contact of one level with the rest of reality. Man, as an individual, is formed of several psychic vestures, each of which has to be paid its due, which is done by living the life of the four stages and the four aims. One's entire life, thus, becomes an approach to eternal beatitude.