No human being is entirely good or totally bad. In order to enhance the goodness quotient and negate the bad one, one has to understand the three layers that a jiva is cloaked in, which needs to be shed, as it were, Sudha Seshayyan said in a discourse.
A comparative study of the siblings in the Ramayana and the Skanda Purana offers great insight into the latent hero and anti-hero traits. Ravana comes through as completely bad, Vibhishana as a very virtuous sibling, while the middle brother Kumbhakarna tries to balance out the two. Similarly, in the Skanda Purana, Soorapadman is totally arrogant. His sibling Simhamukha fails to dissuade him from waging war on Lord Murugan. Tarakasura, the other, elephant-headed brother blindly uses his might in the war and perishes. Lord Murugan sees through Soorapadman’s shape-changing trickery and splits him into two, from which a rooster and peacock emerge.
Why does Murugan take on the rooster as his flag and the peacock as his vehicle, becoming a garland as it were, signifying that he merged with Muruga? Why is he offered such an exalted status? Every jiva has three layers. The innermost one is the egoistic ‘I’, personified by Soorapadman. The second one is karma, which is the net of one’s sins and virtues of past life. The topmost layer is maya, the external world to which a jiva belongs. For the jiva to merge with the Lord, all three layers should be shed by a devotee, one after the other. The rooster crows when it sees light. Every jiva is said to utter God’s name on beholding the inner light, namely, gnana. Above all, every jivan is a vehicle carrying the Lord. One has to realise this intrinsically.