Sri Aurobindo
(in 'Arya', November 1916)
We know the divine Teacher, we see the human disciple;
it remains to form a clear conception of the doctrine. A clear conception
fastening upon the essential idea, the central heart of the teaching is
especially necessary here because the Gita with its rich and many-sided
thought, its synthetical grasp of different aspects of the spiritual life and
the fluent winding motion of its argument lends itself, even more than other
scriptures, to one-sided misrepresentations born of a partisan intellectuality.
The unconscious or half-conscious wresting of fact and word and idea to suit a
preconceived notion or the doctrine or principle of one's preference is
recognised by Indian logicians as one of the most fruitful sources of fallacy;
and it is perhaps the one which it is most difficult for even the most
conscientious thinker to avoid. For the human reason is incapable of always
playing the detective upon itself in this respect; it is its very nature to
seize upon some partial conclusion, idea, principle, become its partisan and
make it the key to all truth, and it has an infinite faculty of doubling upon
itself so as to avoid detecting in its operations this necessary and cherished
weakness. The Gita lends itself easily to this kind of error, because it is
easy, by throwing particular emphasis on one of its aspects or even on some
salient and emphatic text and putting all the rest of the eighteen chapters
into the background or making them a subordinate and auxiliary teaching, to
turn it into a partisan of our own doctrine or dogma.
Thus, there are those who make the
Gita teach, not works at all, but a discipline of preparation for
renouncing life and works: the indifferent performance of prescribed actions or
of whatever task may lie ready to the hands, becomes the means, the discipline;
the final renunciation of life and works is the sole real object. It is quite
easy to justify this view by citations from the book and by a certain
arrangement of stress in following out its argument, especially if we shut our
eyes to the peculiar way in which it uses such a word as sannyasa,
renunciation; but it is quite impossible to persist in this view on an
impartial reading in face of the continual assertion to the very end that
action should be preferred to inaction and that superiority lies with the true,
the inner renunciation of desire by equality and the giving up of works to the
supreme Purusha.
Others again speak of the Gita as if the doctrine of
devotion were its whole teaching and put in the background its monistic
elements and the high place it gives to quietistic immergence in the one self
of all. And undoubtedly its emphasis on devotion, its insistence on the aspect
of the Divine as Lord and Purusha and its doctrine of the Purushottama, the
Supreme Being who is superior both to the mutable Being and to the Immutable
and who is what in His relation to the world we know as God, are the most
striking and among the most vital elements of the Gita.
Still, this Lord is the Self in whom all knowledge
culminates and the Master of sacrifice to whom all works lead as well as the
Lord of Love into whose being the heart of devotion enters, and the Gita
preserves a perfectly equal balance, emphasising now knowledge, now works, now
devotion, but for the purposes of the immediate trend of the thought, not with
any absolute separate preference of one over the others. He in whom all three
meet and become one, He is the Supreme Being, the Purushottama.
But at the present day, since in fact the modern mind
began to recognise and deal at all with the Gita, the tendency is to
subordinate its elements of knowledge and devotion, to take advantage of its
continual insistence on action and to find in it a scripture of the Karmayoga,
a Light leading us on the path of action, a Gospel of Works. Undoubtedly, the
Gita is a Gospel of Works, but of works which culminate in knowledge, that is,
in spiritual realisation and quietude, and of works motived by devotion, that
is, a conscious surrender of one's whole self first into the hands and then
into the being of the Supreme, and not at all of works as they are understood
by the modern mind, not at all an action dictated by egoistic and altruistic,
by personal, social, humanitarian motives, principles, ideals. Yet this is what
present-day interpretations seek to make of the Gita. We are told continually
by many authoritative voices that the Gita, opposing in this the ordinary
ascetic and quietistic tendency of Indian thought and spirituality, proclaims
with no uncertain sound the gospel of human action, the ideal of disinterested
performance of social duties, nay, even, it would seem, the quite modern ideal
of social service. To all this I can only reply that very patently and even on
the very surface of it the Gita does nothing of the kind and that this is a modern
misreading, a reading of the modern mind into an ancient book, of the
present-day European or Europeanised intellect into a thoroughly antique, a
thoroughly Oriental and Indian teaching. That which the Gita teaches is not a
human, but a divine action; not the performance of social duties, but the
abandonment of all other standards of duty or conduct for a selfless
performance of the divine will working through our nature; not social service,
but the action of the Best, the God-possessed, the Master-men done impersonally
for the sake of the world and as a sacrifice to Him who stands behind man and
Nature.
In other words, the Gita is not a book of practical
ethics, but of the spiritual life. The modern mind is just now the European
mind, such as it has become after having abandoned not only the philosophic
idealism of the highest Graeco-Roman culture from which it started, but the
Christian devotionalism of the Middle Ages; these it has replaced by or
transmuted into a practical idealism and social, patriotic and philanthropic
devotion. It has got rid of God or kept Him only for Sunday use and erected in
His place man as its deity and society as its visible idol.
At its best it is practical, ethical, social,
pragmatic, altruistic, humanitarian. Now all these
things are good, are especially needed at the present day, are part of the
divine Will or they would not have become so dominant in humanity. Nor is there
any reason why the divine man, the man who lives in the Brahmic consciousness,
in the God-being should not be all of these things in his action; he will be,
if they are the best ideal of the age, the Yugadharma, and there is no yet
higher ideal to be established, no great radical change to be effected. For he
is, as the Teacher points out to his disciple, the best who has to set the
standard for others; and in fact Arjuna is called upon to live according to the
highest ideals of his age and the prevailing culture, but with knowledge, with
understanding of that which lay behind, and not as ordinary men, with a
following of the merely outward law and rule.
But the point here is that the modern mind has exiled
from its practical motive-power the two essential things, God or the Eternal
and spirituality or the God-state, which are the master conceptions of the
Gita. It lives in humanity only, and the Gita would have us live in God, though
for the world in God; in its life, heart and intellect only, and the Gita would
have us live in the spirit; in the mutable Being who is ''all creatures'', and
the Gita would have us live also in the Immutable and the Supreme; in the
changing march of Time, and the Gita would have us live in the Eternal. Or if
these higher things are now beginning to be vaguely envisaged, it is only to
make them subservient to man and society; but God and spirituality exist in
their own right and not as adjuncts. And in practice the lower in us must learn
to exist for the higher, in order that the higher also may in us consciously
exist for the lower, to draw it nearer to its own altitudes.
Therefore it is a mistake to interpret the Gita from
the standpoint of the mentality of today and force it to teach us the
disinterested performance of duty as the highest and all-sufficient law.
A little consideration of the situation with which the
Gita deals will show us that this could not be its meaning. For the whole point
of the teaching, that from which it arises, that which compels the disciple to
seek the Teacher, is an inextricable clash of the various related conceptions
of duty ending in the collapse of the whole useful intellectual and moral
edifice erected by the human mind. In human life some sort of a clash arises
fairly often, as for instance between domestic duties and the call of the
country or the cause, or between the claim of the country and the good of
humanity or some larger religious or moral principle. An inner situation may
even arise, as with the Buddha, in which all duties have to be abandoned,
trampled on, flung aside in order to follow the call
of the Divine within. I cannot think that the Gita would solve such an inner
situation by sending Buddha back to his wife and father and the government of
the Sakya State, or would direct a Ramakrishna to become a Pundit in a
vernacular school and disinterestedly teach little boys their lessons, or bind
down a Vivekananda to support his family and for that to follow dispassionately
the law or medicine or journalism. The Gita does not teach the disinterested
performance of duties but the following of the divine life, the abandonment of
all dharmas, sarvadharman, to take refuge in the Supreme alone, and the divine
activity of a Buddha, a Ramakrishna, a Vivekananda is
perfectly in consonance with this teaching. Nay, although the Gita prefers
action to inaction, it does not rule out the renunciation of works, but accepts
it as one of the ways to the Divine. If that can only be attained by renouncing
works and life and all duties and the call is strong within us, then into the
bonfire they must go, and there is no help for it. The call of God is
imperative and cannot be weighed against any other considerations.
But here there is this farther difficulty that the
action which Arjuna must do is one from which his moral sense recoils. It is
his duty to fight, you say? But that duty has now become to his mind a terrible
sin. How does it help him or solve his difficulty, to tell him that he must do
his duty disinterestedly, dispassionately? He will want to know which is his duty or how it can be his duty to destroy in a
sanguinary massacre his kin, his race and his country. He is told that he has
right on his side, but that does not and cannot satisfy him, because his very
point is that the justice of his legal claim does not justify him in supporting
it by a pitiless massacre destructive to the future of his nation. Is he then
to act dispassionately in the sense of not caring whether it is a sin or what
its consequences may be so long as he does his duty as a soldier? That may be
the teaching of a State, of politicians, of lawyers, of ethical casuists; it
can never be the teaching of a great religious and philosophical Scripture
which sets out to solve the problem of life and action from the very roots. And
if that is what the Gita has to say on a most poignant moral and spiritual
problem, we must put it out of the list of the world's Scriptures and thrust
it, if anywhere, then into our library of political science and ethical
casuistry.
Undoubtedly, the Gita does, like the Upanishads, teach
the equality which rises above sin and virtue, beyond good and evil, but only
as a part of the Brahmic consciousness and for the man who is on the path and
advanced enough to fulfil the supreme rule. It does not preach indifference to
good and evil for the ordinary life of man, where such a doctrine would have the
most pernicious consequences. On the contrary it affirms that the doers of evil
shall not attain to God. Therefore if Arjuna simply seeks to fulfil in the best
way the ordinary law of man's life, disinterested performance of what he feels
to be a sin, a thing of Hell, will not help him, even though that sin be his
duty as a soldier. He must refrain from what his conscience abhors though a
thousand duties were shattered to pieces.
We must remember that duty is an idea which in
practice rests upon social conceptions. We may extend the term beyond its
proper connotation and talk of our duty to ourselves or we may, if we like, say
in a transcendent sense that it was Buddha's duty to abandon all, or even that
it is the ascetic's duty to sit motionless in a cave! But this is obviously to
play with words.
Duty is a relative term and depends upon our relation
to others. It is a father's duty, as a father, to nurture and educate his
children; a lawyer's to do his best for his client even if he knows him to be
guilty and his defence to be a lie; a soldier's to fight and shoot to order
even if he kill his own kin and countrymen; a judge's to send the guilty to
prison and hang the murderer. And so long as these positions are accepted, the
duty remains clear, a practical matter of course even when it is not a point of
honour or affection, and overrides the absolute religious or moral law.
But what if the inner view is changed, if the lawyer
is awakened to the absolute sinfulness of falsehood, the judge becomes
convinced that capital punishment is a crime against humanity, the man called
upon to the battlefield feels, like the conscientious objector of today or as a
Tolstoy would feel, that in no circumstances is it permissible to take human
life any more than to eat human flesh? It is obvious that here the moral law
which is above all relative duties must prevail; and that law depends on no
social relation or conception of duty but on the awakened inner perception of
man, the moral being.
There are in the world, in fact, two different laws of
conduct each valid on its own plane, the rule principally dependent on external
status and the rule independent of status and entirely dependent on the thought
and conscience. The Gita does not teach us to subordinate the higher plane to
the lower, it does not ask the awakened moral
consciousness to slay itself on the altar of duty as a sacrifice and victim to
the law of the social status. It calls us higher and not lower; from the
conflict of the two planes it bids us ascend to a supreme poise above the
mainly practical, above the purely ethical, to the Brahmic consciousness. It
replaces the conception of social duty by a divine obligation. The subjection
to external law gives place to a certain principle of inner self-determination
of action proceeding by the soul's freedom from the tangled law of works. And
this, as we shall see, - the Brahmic consciousness, the soul's freedom from
works and the determination of works in the nature by the Lord within and above
us, - is the kernel of the Gita's teaching with regard to action.
The Gita can only be understood, like any other great
work of the kind, by studying it in its entirety and as a developing argument.
But the modern interpreters, starting from the great writer Bankim Chandra Chatterji
who first gave to the Gita this new sense of a Gospel of Duty, have laid an
almost exclusive stress on the first three or four chapters and in those on the
idea of equality, on the expression kartavyam karma, the work that is to be
done, which they render by duty, and on the phrase ''Thou hast a right to
action, but none to the fruits of action'' which is now popularly quoted as the
great word, mahavakya, of the Gita. The rest of the eighteen chapters with
their high philosophy are given a secondary importance, except indeed the great
vision in the eleventh. This is natural enough for the modern mind which is, or
has been till yesterday, inclined to be impatient of metaphysical subtleties
and far-off spiritual seekings, eager to get to work and, like Arjuna himself, mainly concerned for a workable law of works, a
dharma. But it is the wrong way to handle this Scripture.
The equality which the Gita preaches is not
disinterestedness, - the great command to Arjuna given after the foundation and
main structure of the teaching have been laid and built, ''Arise, slay thy
enemies, enjoy a prosperous kingdom,'' has not the ring of an uncompromising
altruism or of a white, dispassionate abnegation; it is a state of inner poise
and wideness which is the foundation of spiritual freedom. With that poise, in
that freedom we have to do the ''work that is to be done,'' a phrase which the
Gita uses with the greatest wideness including in it all works, sarvakarmani,
and which far exceeds, though it may include, social duties or ethical
obligations. What is the work to be done is not to be determined by the
individual choice; nor is the right to the action and the rejection of claim to
the fruit the great word of the Gita, but only a preliminary word governing the
first state of the disciple when he begins ascending the hill of Yoga. It is
practically superseded at a subsequent stage. For the Gita goes on to affirm
emphatically that the man is not the doer of the action; it is Prakriti, it is
Nature, it is the great Force with its three modes of action that works through
him, and he must learn to see that it is not he who does the work. Therefore
the ''right to action'' is an idea which is only valid so long as we are still
under the illusion of being the doer; it must necessarily disappear from the
mind like the claim to the fruit, as soon as we cease to be to our own
consciousness the doer of our works. All pragmatic egoism, whether of the claim
to fruits or of the right to action, is then at an end.
But the determinism of Prakriti is not the last word
of the Gita. The equality of the will and the rejection of fruits are only
means for entering with the mind and the heart and the understanding into the
divine consciousness and living in it; and the Gita expressly says that they
are to be employed as a means as long as the disciple is unable so to live or
even to seek by practice the gradual development of this higher state. And what
is this Divine, whom
What the great, the supreme word of the Gita is, its
mahavakya, we have not to seek; for the Gita itself declares it in its last utterance,
the crowning note of the great diapason. ''With the Lord in thy heart take
refuge with all thy being; by His grace thou shalt attain to the supreme peace
and the eternal status. So have I expounded to thee a knowledge more secret
than that which is hidden. Further hear the most
secret, the supreme word that I shall speak to thee. Become my-minded, devoted
to Me, to Me do sacrifice and adoration; infallibly,
thou shalt come to Me, for dear to me art thou. Abandoning all laws of conduct
seek refuge in Me alone. I will release thee from all
sin; do not grieve.'' The argument of the Gita resolves itself into three great
steps by which action rises out of the human into the divine plane leaving the
bondage of the lower for the liberty of a higher law.
First, by the renunciation of desire and a perfect
equality works have to be done as a sacrifice by man as the doer, a sacrifice
to a deity who is the supreme and only Self though by him not yet realised in
his own being. This is the initial step. Secondly, not only the desire of the
fruit, but the claim to be the doer of works has to be renounced in the
realisation of the Self as the equal, the inactive, the immutable principle and
of all works as simply the operation of universal Force, of the Nature-Soul,
Prakriti, the unequal, active, mutable power. Lastly, the supreme Self has to
be seen as the supreme Purusha governing this Prakriti, of whom the soul in
Nature is a partial manifestation, by whom all works are directed, in a perfect
transcendence, through Nature. To him love and adoration and the sacrifice of
works have to be offered; the whole being has to be surrendered to Him and the
whole consciousness raised up to dwell in this divine
consciousness so that the human soul may share in His divine transcendence of
Nature and of His works and act in a perfect spiritual liberty.
Sri Aurobindo
(An excerpt from ``Essays
on the Gita'', pp. 503-509. Made online
by Sai Susarla (sai@cs.utah.edu))
All the problems of human life arise from the
complexity of our existence, the obscurity of its essential principle and the
secrecy of the inmost power that makes out its determinations and governs its
purpose and its processes. If our existence were of one piece, solely
material-vital or solely mental or solely spiritual, or even if the others were
entirely or mainly involved in one of these or were quite latent in our subconscient
or our superconscient parts, there would be nothing to perplex us; the material
and vital law would be imperative or the mental would be clear to its own pure
and unobstructed principle or the spiritual self-existent and self-sufficient
to spirit. The animals are aware of no problems; a mental god in a world of
pure mentality would admit none or would solve them all by the purity of a
mental rule or the satisfaction of a rational harmony; a pure spirit would be
above them and self-content in the infinite. But the
existence of man is a triple web, a thing mysteriously physical-vital, mental
and spiritual at once, and he knows not what the true relations of these things
are, which the real reality of his life and his nature, whither the attraction
of his destiny and where the sphere of his perfection.
Matter and life are his actual basis, the thing from
which he starts and on which he stands and whose requirement and law he has to
satisfy if he would exist at all on earth and in the body. The material and
vital law is a rule of survival, of struggle, of desire and possession, of
self-assertion and the satisfaction of the body, the life and the ego. All the
intellectual reasoning in the world, all the ethical idealism and spiritual
absolutism of which the higher faculties of man are capable, cannot abolish the
reality and claim of our vital and material base or prevent the race from
following under the imperative compulsion of Nature its aims and the
satisfaction of its necessities or from making its important problems a great
and legitimate part of human destiny and human interest and endeavour. And the
intelligence of man even, failing to find any sustenance in spiritual or ideal
solutions that solve everything else but the pressing problems of our actual
human life, often turns away from them to an exclusive acceptance of the vital
and material existence and the reasoned or organized satisfaction. A gospel of
the will to live or the will to power of a rationalised vital and material
perfection becomes the recognized dharma of the human race and all else is
considered either a pretentious falsity or a quite subsidiary thing, a side
issue of a minor and dependent consequence.
Matter and life, however, in spite of their insistence
and great importance are not all that man is, nor can he wholly accept mind as
nothing but a servant of the life and body admitted to certain pure enjoyment
of its own as a sort of reward for its service or regard it as no more than an
extension and flower of the vital urge, an ideal luxury contingent upon the
satisfaction of the material life. The mind much more intimately than the body
and the life is the man, and the mind as it develops insists more and more on
making the body and the life an instrument - an indispensable instrument and
yet a considerable obstacle, otherwise there is no problem - for its own
characteristic satisfactions and self-realization. The mind of man is not only
a vital and physical, but an intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, psychic,
emotional and dynamic intelligence, and in the sphere of each of its tendencies
its highest and strongest nature is to strain towards some absolute of them
which the frame of life will now allow it to capture wholly and embody and make
here entirely real. The mental absolute of our aspiration remains as a partly
grasped shining or fiery ideal which the mind can make inwardly very present to
itself, inwardly imperative on its effort, and can even effectuate partly, but
not compel all the facts of life into its image. There is thus an absolute, a
high imperative of intellectual truth and reason sought for by our intellectual
being, there is an absolute, an imperative of right and conduct aimed at by the
ethical conscience, there is an absolute, an imperative of love, sympathy, compassion,
oneness yearned after by our emotional and psychic nature; there is an
absolute, an imperative of delight and beauty quivered to by the aesthetic
soul; there is an absolute, an imperative of inner self-mastery and control of
life laboured after by the dynamic will; all these are there together and
impinge upon the absolute, the imperative of possession and pleasure and safe
embodied existence insisted on by the vital and physical mind. And the human
intelligence, since it is not able to realise entirely any of these things,
much less all of them together, erects in each sphere many standards and
dharmas, standards of truth and reason, of right and conduct, of delight and
beauty, of love, sympathy and oneness, of self-mastery and control, of self-preservation
and possession and vital efficiency and pleasure, and tries to impose them on
life. The absolute shining ideals stand far above and beyond our capacity and
rare individuals approximate to them as best they can: the mass follow or
profess to follow some less magnificent norm, some established possible and
relative standard. Human life as a whole undergoes the attraction and yet
rejects the ideal. Life resists in the strength of some obscure infinite of its
own and wears down or breaks down any established mental and moral order. And
this must be either because the two are quite different and disparate though
meeting and interacting principles or because mind has not the clue to the
whole reality of life. The clue must be sought in something greater, an unknown
something above the mentality and morality of the human creature.
The mind itself has the vague sense of some surpassing
factor of this kind and in the pursuit of its absolutes frequently strikes
against it. It glimpses a state, a power, a presence that is near and within
and inmost to it and yet immeasurably greater and singularly distant and above
it; it has a vision of something more essential, more absolute than its own
absolutes, intimate, infinite, one, and it is that which we call God, Self, or
Spirit. This then the mind attempts to know, enter, touch and seize wholly, to
approach it or become it, to arrive at some kind of unity or lose itself in a
complete identity with that mystery, aascharyam.
The difficulty is that this spirit in its purity seems something yet farther
than the mental absolutes from the actualities of life, something not
translatable by mind into its own terms, much less into those of life and
action. Therefore we have the intransigent absolutists of the spirit who reject
the mental and condemn the material being and yearn after a pure spiritual
existence happily purchased by the dissolution of all that we are in life and
mind, a Nirvana. The rest of spiritual effort is for these fanatics of the
Absolute a mental preparation or a compromise, a spiritualising of life and
mind as much as possible. And because the difficulty most constantly insistent
on man's mentality in practice is that presented by the claims of his vital
being, by life and conduct and action, the direction taken by this preparatory
endeavour consists mainly in a spiritualising of the ethical supported by the
psychical mind - or rather it brings in the spiritual power and purity to aid
these in enforcing their absolute claim and to impart a greater authority than
life allows to the ethical ideal of right and truth of conduct or the psychic
ideal of love and sympathy and oneness. These things are helped to some highest
expression, given their broadest luminous basis by an assent of the reason and
will to the underlying truth of the absolute oneness of the spirit and
therefore the essential oneness of all living creatures. This kind of
spirituality linked on in some way to the demands of the normal mind of man,
persuaded to the acceptance of useful social duty and current law of social
conduct, popularised by cult and ceremony and image is the outward substance of
the world's greater religions. These religions have their individual victories,
call in some ray of a higher light, impose some shadow of a larger spiritual or
semi-spiritual rule, but cannot effect a complete
victory, end flatly in a compromise and in the act of compromise are defeated
by life. Its problems remain and even recur in their fiercest forms - even such
as this grim problem of Kurukshetra. The idealising intellect and ethical mind
hope always to eliminate them, to discover some happy device born of their own
aspiration and made effective by their own imperative insistence, which will
annihilate this nether untoward aspect of life; but it endures and is not
eliminated. The spiritualised intelligence on the other hand offers indeed by
the voice of religion the promise of some victorious millennium hereafter, but
meanwhile half convinced of terrestrial impotence, persuaded that the soul is a
stranger and intruder upon earth, declares that after all not here in the life
of the body or in the collective life of mortal man but in some immortal Beyond
lies the heaven or the Nirvana where alone is to be found the true spiritual
existence.
It is here that the Gita intervenes with a restatement
of the truth of the Spirit, of the Self, of God and of the world and Nature. It
extends and remoulds the truth evolved by a later thought from the ancient
Upanishads and ventures with assured steps on an endeavour to apply its solving
power to the problem of life and action. The solution offered by the Gita does
not disentangle all the problem as it offers itself to modern mankind; as
stated here to a more ancient mentality, it does not meet the insistent
pressure of the present mind of man for a collective advance, does not respond
to its cry for a collective life that will at last embody a greater rational
and ethical and, if possible, even a dynamic spiritual ideal. Its call is to
the individual who has become capable of a complete spiritual existence; but
for the rest of the race it prescribes only a gradual advance, to be wisely
effected by following out faithfully with more and more of intelligence and
moral purpose and with a final turn to spirituality the law of their nature.
Its message touches the other smaller solutions but, even when it accepts them
partly, it is to point them beyond themselves to a higher and more integral
secret into which yet only the few individuals have shown themselves fit to
enter.
The Gita's message to the mind that follows after the
vital and material life is that all life is indeed a manifestation of the
universal Power in the individual, a derivation from the Self, a ray from the
Divine, but actually it figures the Self and the Divine veiled in a disguising
Maya, and to pursue the lower life for its own sake is to persist in a
stumbling path and to enthrone our nature's obscure ignorance and not at all to
find the true truth and complete law of existence. A gospel of the will to live,
the will to power, of the satisfaction of desire, of the glorification of mere
force and strength, of the worship of the ego and its vehement acquisitive
self-will and tireless self-regarding intellect is the gospel of the Asura and
it can lead only to some gigantic ruin and perdition. The vital and material
man must accept for his government a religious and social and ideal dharma by
which, while satisfying desire and interest under right restrictions, he can
train and subdue his lower personality and scrupulously attune it to a higher
law both of the personal and the communal life.
The Gita's message to the mind occupied with the
pursuit of intellectual, ethical and social standards, the mind that insists on
salvation by the observance of established dharmas, the moral law, social duty
and function of the solutions of the liberated intelligence, is that this is
indeed a very necessary stage, the dharma has indeed to be observed and,
rightly observed, can raise the stature of the spirit and prepare and serve the
spiritual life, but still it is not the complete and last truth of existence.
The soul of man has to go beyond to some more absolute dharma of man's
spiritual and immortal nature. And this can only be done if we repress and get
rid of the ignorant formulations of the lower mental elements and falsehood of
egoistic personality, impersonalise the action of the intelligence and will,
live in the identity of the one self in all, break out of all ego-moulds into
the impersonal spirit. The mind moves under the limiting compulsion of the
triple lower nature, it erects its standards in obedience to the tamasic,
rajasic or at highest the sattwic qualities; but the destiny of the soul is a
divine perfection and liberation and that can only be based in the freedom of
our highest self, can only be found by passing through its vast impersonality
and universality beyond mind into the integral light of the immeasurable
Godhead and supreme Infinite who is beyond all dharmas.
The Gita's message to those, absolutist seekers of the
Infinite, who carry impersonality to an exclusive extreme, entertain an
intolerant passion for the extinction of life and action and would have as the
one ultimate aim and ideal an endeavour to cease from all individual being in
the pure silence of the ineffable Spirit, is that this is indeed one path of
journey and entry into the Infinite, but the most difficult, the ideal of
inaction a dangerous thing to hold up by precept or example before the world,
this way, though great, yet not the best way for man and his knowledge, though
true, yet not the integral knowledge. The Supreme, the all-conscious Self, the
Godhead, the Infinite is not solely a spiritual existence remote and ineffable;
he is here in the universe at once hidden and expressed through man and the
gods and through all beings and in all that is. And it is by finding him not
only in some immutable silence but in the world and its beings and in all self
and in all Nature, it is by raising to an integral as well as to a highest union
with him all the activities of the intelligence, the heart, the will, the life
that man can solve at once his inner riddle of Self and God and the outer
problem of his active human existence. Made Godlike, God-becoming, he can enjoy
the infinite breadth of a supreme spiritual consciousness that is reached
through works no less than through love and knowledge. Immortal and free, he
can continue his human action from that highest level and transmute it into a
supreme and all-embracing divine activity - that indeed is the ultimate crown
and significance here of all works and living and sacrifice and the world's
endeavour.
This highest message is first for those who have the
strength to follow after it, the master men, the great spirits, the
God-knowers, God-doers, God-lovers who can live in God and for God and do their
work joyfully for him in the world, a divine work uplifted above the restless
darkness of the human mind and the false limitations of the ego. At the same
time, and here we get the gleam of a larger promise which we may even extend to
the hope of a collective turn towards perfection, - for if there is hope for
man, why should there not be hope for mankind? - the Gita declares that all can
if they will, even to the lowest and sin-fullest among men, enter into the path
of this Yoga. And if there is a true self-surrender and an absolute unegoistic
faith in the in-dwelling Divinity, success is certain in this path. The
decisive turn is needed; there must be an abiding belief in the Spirit, a
sincere and insistent will to live in the Divine, to be in self one with him
and in Nature - where too we are an eternal portion of his being - one with his
greater spiritual Nature, God-possessed in all our members and God-like.