1 THE DIVINE TEACHER
Gita replaces the conception of social duty by a divine obligation. For the Gita goes on to affirm emphatically that the man is not the doer of the action; 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.
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."
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.
The first step is Karmayoga, the selfless sacrifice of works, the second is Jnanayoga, the self-realisation and knowledge of the true nature of the self and the world. The last step is Bhaktiyoga, adoration and seeking of the supreme Self as the Divine Being
2. THE BATTLEFIELD
The very quiescence and passivity of the spiritual man under violence and aggression awakens the tremendous forces of the world to a retributive action; and it may even be more merciful to stay in their path, though by force, those who represent evil than to allow them to trample on until they call down on themselves a worse destruction than we would ever think of inflicting. That which is its root must first disappear out of humanity.
The sorrow for the bodily death of his friends and kindred is a grief to which wisdom and the true knowledge of life lend no sanction. The enlightened man does not mourn either for the living or the dead, for he knows that suffering and death are merely incidents in the history of the soul. There is no such thing as death, for it is the body that dies and the body is not the man. That which really is, cannot go out of existence, though it may change the forms through which it appears, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into being. The soul is and cannot cease to be.
"Slain thou shalt win Heaven, victorious thou shalt enjoy the earth; therefore arise, O son of Kunti, resolved upon battle." Destroy when by destruction the world must advance, but hate not that which thou destroyest, neither grieve for all those who perish. Know everywhere the one self, know all to be immortal souls and the body to be but dust. Do thy work with a calm, strong and equal spirit; fight and fall nobly or conquer mightily. For this is the work that God and thy nature have given to thee to accomplish."
3 SANKHYA, WORKS AND SACRIFICE
The sage who has Yoga attains soon to the Brahman; and even though he does works, he is not involved in them." He knows that the actions are not his, but Nature’s and by that very knowledge he is free; he has renounced works, does no actions, though actions are done through him; he becomes the Self, he sees all existences as becomings of that self-existent Being.
Renunciation is indispensable, but the true renunciation is the inner rejection of desire and egoism. Knowledge is essential, there is no higher force for liberation, but works with knowledge are also needed for the soul to dwell entirely in the Brahmic status not only in repose and inactive calm, but in the very midst and stress and violence of action. Devotion is all-important; by the union of knowledge, devotion and works the soul is taken up into the highest status of the Gita.
"Supreme, they say," beyond their objects "are the senses, supreme over the senses the mind, supreme over the mind the intelligent will: that which is supreme over the intelligent will, is he,"—is the conscious self, the Purusha". Therefore, it is this Purusha which we have to understand and become aware of by the intelligence.
For while others are filled with the troubling sense of ego and mine and thine, he is one with the one Self in all and has no "I" or "mine". He acts as others, but he has abandoned all desires and their longings. He attains to the great; he has extinguished his individual ego in the One, lives in that unity and, fixed in that status at his end, can attain to extinction in the Brahman, Nirvana.
4 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SACRIFICE
Where sacrifice is not willingly given, Nature exacts it by force, she satisfies the law of her living. A mutual giving and receiving is the law of Life without which it cannot for one moment endure, and this fact is the stamp of the divine creative Will on the world it has manifested in its being. The works of sacrifice are thus vindicated as a means of liberation and absolute spiritual perfection.
The universal law of sacrifice is the sign that the world is of God and belongs to God and that life is his dominion and house of worship and not a field for the self-satisfaction of the independent ego; but the discovery of God, the worship and seeking of the Divine and the Infinite through a constantly enlarging sacrifice.
To raise our whole existence to the Divine Being, to dwell in him , to be at one with him, to be moved in will and action utterly and faultlessly by the divine will, to lose desire in his love and delight, is man’s perfection; it is that which the Gita describes as the highest secret.
So Janaka and other great Karmayogins of the mighty ancient Yoga attained to perfection, by equal and desireless works done as a sacrifice, without the least egoistic aim or attachment. The rule given here by the Gita is the rule for the master man, the superman, the divinised human being, the Best, not in the sense of any Nietzschean, any onesided and lopsided, any Olympian, Apollonian or Dionysian, any angelic or demoniac supermanhood, but in that of the man whose whole personality has been offered up into the being, nature and consciousness of the one transcendent and universal Divinity.
5 AVATARHOOD
There is the inherent consciousness of the divine in all, for in all the Divine dwells; but he dwells there covered by his Maya and the essential self-knowledge of beings is reft from them, turned into the error of egoism by the action of Maya, the action of the mechanism of Prakriti. Still by drawing back from the mechanism of Nature to her inner and secret Master man can become conscious of the indwelling Divinity.
The descent of the Avatar, like the divine birth from the other side, is essentially a spiritual phenomenon, it is a soul-birth; but still there is here an attendant physical birth.
Avatarhood is a fact of divine life and consciousness which may realise itself in an outward action, but must persist, when that action is over and has done its work, in a spiritual influence; or may realise itself in a spiritual influence and teaching, but must then have its permanent effect, even when the new religion or discipline is exhausted, in the thought, temperament and outward life of mankind.
The Avatar comes to reveal the divine nature in man above this lower nature and to show what are the divine works, free, unegoistic, disinterested, impersonal, universal, full of the divine light, the divine power and the divine love.
6 EQUALITY
The liberated man has no personal hopes; he does not seize on things as his personal possessions; he receives what the divine Will brings him, covets nothing, is jealous of none: what comes to him he takes without repulsion and without attachment; what goes from him he allows to depart into the whirl of things without repining or grief or sense of loss. His heart and self are under perfect control; they are free from reaction and passion, they make no turbulent response to the touches of outward things.
"The self in him is unattached to the touches of external things; he finds his happiness in himself." He sees, as the Gita puts it, that he is himself his own enemy and his own friend, and therefore he takes care not to dethrone himself by casting his being into the hands of desire and passion, but delivers himself out of that imprisonment by his own inner power, for whoever has conquered his lower self, finds in his higher self his best friend and ally.
The perfect Yogin is no solitary musing on the Self in his ivory tower of spiritual isolation, but a many-sided universal worker for the good of the world, for God in the world. For he is a lover and devotee of the Divine, as well as a sage and a Yogin, a lover who loves God wherever he finds Him and who finds Him everywhere; and what he loves, he does not disdain to serve, nor does action carry him away from the bliss of union, since all his acts proceed from the One in him and to the One in all they are directed
Whatever he does and however he lives, the free soul lives in the Divine.
7 MODES OF NATURE
At least ninetenths of our freedom of will is a palpable fiction; that will is created and determined not by its own self-existent action at a given moment, but by our past, our heredity, our training, our environment, the whole tremendous complex thing we call Karma, which is, behind us.
When we think that we are acting quite freely, powers are concealed behind our action which escape the most careful self-introspection; when we think that we are free from ego, the ego is there, concealed, in the mind of the saint as in that of the sinner. When our eyes are really opened on our action and its springs, we are obliged to say with the Gita, "it was the modes of Nature that were acting upon the modes."
Only when we cease to satisfy the ego, to think and to will from the ego, the limited "I" in us, then is there a real freedom. In other words, freedom, highest self-mastery begin when above the natural self we see and hold the supreme Self of which the ego is an obstructing veil and a blinding shadow.
Knowing himself as the Akshara Brahman, the unchanging Purusha, he will know himself as an immutable impersonal self, the Atman, tranquilly observing and impartially supporting the action, but himself calm, indifferent, untouched, motionless, pure, one with all beings in their self, not one with Nature and her workings. The natural being, the mind, body, life, still remain, Nature still works; but the inner being does not identify himself with these, nor while the gunas play in the natural being, does he rejoice or grieve. He is the calm and free immutable Self observing all.
8 NIRVANA AND KARMAYOGA
The mark of Nirvana is the supreme peace of a calm self extinction. the Gita uses always the phrase extinction in the Brahman; and the Brahman here certainly seems to mean the Immutable, to denote primarily at least the inner timeless Self withdrawn from active participation even though immanent in the externality of Nature.
Nirvana is a passage into this other true unifying consciousness which is the heart of existence and its continent and its whole containing and supporting, its whole original and eternal and final truth. Nirvana when we gain it, enter into it, is not only within us, but all around. It is the Self which we are within, the supreme Self of our individual being but also the Self which we are without, the supreme Self of the universe, the self of all existences.
In this process the Yogin is directed to practise continually union with the Self so that that may become his normal consciousness. He is to sit apart and alone, with all desire and idea of possession banished from his mind, self-controlled in his whole being and consciousness. One with him in being, we grow one with all beings in the universe and do divine works.
9 THE TWO NATURES
Maya, a power of illusion, by which it is not meant that it is all non-existent or deals with unrealities, but that it bewilders our knowledge, creates false values, envelops us in ego, mentality, sense, physicality, limited intelligence and there conceals from us the supreme truth of our existence. This illusive Maya hides from us the Divine that we are, the infinite and imperishable spirit.
It is in order to recede from the false personality that we have to resort to the impersonal Self and make ourselves one with it. Then, freed so from the ego personality, we can find the relation of the true individual to the Purushottama.
"The evil-doers attain not to me," says the Purushottama, "souls bewildered, low in the human scale; for their knowledge is reft away from them by Maya and they resort to the nature of being of the Asura." This bewilderment is a befooling of the soul in Nature by the deceptive ego. The evil-doer cannot attain to the Supreme because he is forever trying to satisfy the idol ego on the lowest scale of human nature; his real God is this ego.
"If we give a swan milk mixed with water, the swan will take the milk and leave aside the water. Similarly, this material world is made of two natures—the inferior nature and the superior nature. The superior nature means spiritual life, and the inferior nature is material life. Thus a person who gives up the material part of this world and takes only the spiritual part is called paramahamsa." (Shrila Prabhupada, Teachings of Queen Kunti, Ch 3)
10 THE SYNTHESIS OF DEVOTION AND KNOWLEDGE
He is ever in constant union with him, his whole life and being are an eternal Yoga with the Transcendent than whom there is nothing higher, with the Universal besides whom there is none else and nothing else. On him is concentred all his bhakti, not on any partial godhead, rule or cult. This single devotion is his whole law of living and he has gone beyond all creeds of religious belief, rules of conduct, personal aims of life. He has no griefs to be healed, for he is in possession of the All blissful. He has no desires to hunger after, for he possesses the highest and the All and is close to the All-Power that brings all fulfilment.
He has no doubts or baffled seeking left, for all knowledge streams upon him from the Light in which he lives. He loves perfectly the Divine and is his beloved; for as he takes joy in the Divine, so too the Divine takes joy in him. This is the God-lover who has the knowledge. And this knower, says the Godhead in the Gita, is my self; the others seize only motives and aspects in Nature, but he the very self-being and all-being of the Purushottama with which he is in union. His is the divine birth in the supreme Nature, integral in being completed in will, absolute in love, perfected in knowledge. In him the Jiva’s cosmic existence is justified because it has exceeded itself and so found its own whole and highest truth of being.
11 SECRET OF SECRETS
We can see ourselves steadily becoming that on which we keep our minds fixed and to which we constantly aspire. Therefore any lapse of the thought, any infidelity of the memory means always a retardation of the change or some fall in its process and a going back towards what we were before,—at least so long as we have not substantially and irrevocably fixed our new becoming.
"Therefore," says the divine Teacher, "at all times remember me and fight; for if thy mind and thy understanding are always fixed on and given up to Me, to Me thou shalt surely come. For it is by thinking always of him with a consciousness united with him in an undeviating Yoga of constant practice that one comes to the divine and supreme Purusha."
The supreme secret of spiritual perfection is the mystery of the transcendent Godhead who is all and everywhere, yet so much greater and other than the universe nothing expresses him really, and no language can suggest the truyh of his unimaginable being.
To know Vasudeva as all and live in that knowledge is the secret. And yet even so to know him is not enough unless it is accompanied by an intense uplifting of the heart and soul Godwards, unless it kindles a one-pointed and at the same time all-embracing love, adoration, aspiration. Indeed the knowledge which is not vivified by an uplifting is only an intellectual seeing and a barren cognitive endeavour.
12 WORKS, DEVOTION AND KNOWLEDGE
The growth of the god in man is man’s proper business; the steadfast turning of this lower Asuric and Rakshasic into the divine nature is the carefully hidden meaning of human life. Therefore when this vision, this knowledge seizes on the soul, its whole life-aspiration becomes a surpassing love and fathomless adoration of the Divine and Infinite. The mind attaches itself singly to the eternal, the spiritual, the living, the universal, the Real; it values nothing but for its sake, it delights only in the all-blissful Purusha.
The will of self-giving forces away by its power the veil between God and man; it annuls every error and annihilates every obstacle. Those who aspire in their human strength by effort of knowledge or effort of virtue or effort of laborious self-discipline, grow with much anxious difficulty towards the Eternal; but when the soul gives up its ego and its works to the Divine, God himself comes to us and takes up our burden. "This is my word of promise," cries the voice of the Godhead to Arjuna, "that he who loves me shall not perish."
To make the mind one with the divine consciousness, to make the whole of our emotional nature one love of God everywhere, to make all our works one sacrifice to the Lord of the worlds and all our worship and aspiration one adoration of him and self-surrender, to direct the whole self Godwards in an entire union is the way to rise out of a mundane into a divine existence. This is the Gita’s teaching of divine love and devotion, in which knowledge, works and the heart’s longing become one in a supreme unification, a merging of all their divergences.
13. THE SUPREME WORD OF THE GITA
"I will speak this supreme word to thee" says the Godhead "from my will for thy soul’s good, now that thy heart is taking delight in me." For this delight of the heart in God is the whole constituent and essence of true Bhakti.
"Whosoever knows me," says the Godhead, "as the unborn who is without origin, mighty lord of the worlds and peoples, lives unbewildered among mortals and is delivered from all sin and evil. The wise hold me for the birth of each and all, hold each and all as developing from me its action and movement, and so holding they love and adore me. and I destroy their ignorance."
The whole consciousness becomes full of the Godhead; the whole life flows into one sea of bliss-experience. All the speech and thought of such God lovers becomes a mutual utterance and understanding of the Divine. In that one joy is concentrated all the contentment of the being, all the play and pleasure of the nature. There is is an unbroken continuity of the experience of oneness in the spirit.
He destroys the ignorance of the separative mind and stands revealed in the human spirit.
14 GOD IN POWER OF BECOMING
In every being and object God dwells concealed and discoverable; he is housed as in a crypt in the mind and heart of everything and creature, an inner self in the core of its subjective and its objective becoming, one who is the beginning and middle and end of all that is, has been or will be..
Whatever beautiful and glorious creature thou seest in the world, whatever being is mighty and forceful among men and above man and below him, know to be a very splendour, light and energy of Me and born of a potent portion and intense power of my existence. But what need is there of a multitude of details for this knowledge?
Take it thus, that I am here in this world and everywhere, I am in all and I constitute all: there is nothing else than I, nothing without Me. I support this entire universe with a single degree of my illimitable power and an infinitesimal portion of my fathomless spirit; all these worlds are only sparks, hints, glinting of the I. I Am eternal and immeasurable.
15. THE THEORY OF VIBHUTI
The spiritual seeing of God and world is not ideative only, not even mainly or primarily ideative. It is direct experience and as real, vivid, near, constant, effective, intimate as to the mind its sensuous seeing and feeling of images, objects and persons. The liberated vision sees three things at once as the whole occult truth of the natural being.
First and foremost it sees the divine Prakriti in all, secret, present, waiting for evolution; it sees too, secondly, the differences of the apparent action in Deva and Rakshasa, man and beast and bird and reptile, good and wicked, ignorant and learned, but as action of divine quality and energy under these conditions, under these masks. Finally, it sees the upward urge of the striving powers of the Will to be towards Godhead
God must be seen and loved in the ignorant, the humble, the weak, the vile, and the outcaste. Respect for the divinity in man, in all men, is not diminished, but heightened and given a richer significance by lifting our eyes to the trail of the great Pioneers who lead or point him by whatever step of attainment towards supermanhood.
16. THE VISION OF THE WORLD-SPIRIT- TIME THE DESTROYER
Nature, hast to enjoy in Nature the fruit given by me, the empire of right and justice. Let this be sufficient for thee,—to be one with God in thy soul, to receive his command, to do his will, to see calmly a supreme purpose fulfilled in the world. "I am Time the waster of the peoples arisen and increased whose will in my workings is here to destroy the nations. Fight, thou shalt conquer the adversary in the battle."
This the Teacher tells Arjun at the close, "That which in thy egoism thou thinkest saying, I will not fight, vain is this thy resolve: Nature shall yoke thee to thy work. Bound by thy own action which is born of the law of thy being, what from delusion thou desirest not to do, that thou shalt do even perforce."
The highest way appointed for him is to carry out the will of God without egoism with the constant supporting memory of the Godhead in himself and man, and in whatever ways are appointed for him by the Lord of his Nature.
Not appalled by the face of the Destroyer, he will see within it the eternal Spirit imperishable in all these perishing bodies.
17 THE VISION OF THE WORLD-SPIRIT THE DOUBLE ASPECT
It is the mediating aspect which man must have for his support constantly before him. To this humanised embodied soul their end becomes here a union, closeness, a constant companionship of man and God, man living in the world for God, God dwelling in man and turning to his own divine ends in him the enigmatic world-process. And beyond the end is a yet more wonderful oneness and in living in the last transfigurations of the Eternal
"The greater Form"—and this is repeated again after it has disappeared—"is only for the rare highest souls. The gods themselves ever desire to look upon it. It cannot be won by Veda or austerities or gifts or sacrifice; it can be seen, known, entered into only by that devotion which regards, adores and loves Me alone in all things."
This vision can be reached only by the absolute adoration, the love, the intimate unity that crowns at their summit the fullness of works and knowledge. This is difficult indeed for limited man imprisoned in his mind and body: but, says the Godhead,
"Be a doer of my works, accept me as the Supreme Being and object, become my devotee, be free from attachment and without enmity to all existences; for such a man comes to me."
18. THE WAY AND THE BHAKTA
"Those who found their mind in Me and by constant union, possessed of a supreme faith, seek after Me, I hold to be the most perfectly in union of Yoga." The supreme faith is that which sees God in all and to its eye the manifestation and the non-manifestation are one Godhead. The perfect union is that which meets the Divine at every moment, in every action and with all the integrality of the nature.
On me, says the Godhead to the soul of man, repose thy entire mind and lodge all thy understanding in me: I will lift them up bathed in the supernal blaze of the divine love and will and knowledge to myself from whom these things flow. Doubt not that thou shalt dwell in me above this mortal existence.
The devotee of the Supreme Being is one who has a universal heart and mind which has broken down all the narrow walls of the ego. A universal love dwells in his heart, a universal compassion flows from it like an encompassing sea. He will have friendship and pity for all beings and hate for no living thing..
A desireless content is his, a tranquil equality to pleasure and pain, suffering and happiness, and a love and devotion which gives up the whole mind and reason to the Lord. He is a spirit of calm by whom the world is not afflicted or troubled, nor is he afflicted or troubled by the world, a soul of peace with whom all are at peace.
Again, he will be one who neither desires the pleasant and rejoices at its touch nor abhors the unpleasant and sorrows at its burden. He has abolished the distinction between fortunate and unfortunate happenings, because his devotion receives all things equally as good from the hands of his eternal Lover and Master.
19. THE FIELD AND ITS OWNER
To be fixed on the transient, to be limited in the phenomenon is to accept mortality. The soul when it allows itself to be tyrannised over by the appearances of Nature, misses itself and goes whirling about in the cycle of the births and deaths of its bodies. To enjoy the eternity to which birth and life are only outward circumstances, is the soul’s true immortality and transcendence.
He is attached to nothing, bound by nothing, fixed to nothing that he does. A divine knowledge and a perfect turning with adoration to this Divine is the secret of the great spiritual liberation. Freedom, love and spiritual knowledge raise us from mortal nature to immortal being.
As we grow more and more aware of this eternal, we put on our own eternity and are forever. Then we see that all our works are an evolution and operation of Nature and our real self not the executive doer, but the free witness and lord and unattached enjoyer of the action. When we libeate from the law of the mind and body, then we attain to the supreme nature of the spirit. That splendid and lofty change is the last, the divine and infinite becoming, the putting off of mortal nature, the putting on of an immortal existence.
20 ABOVE THE GUNAS
To see that the modes of Nature are the whole agency and cause of our works and to know and turn to that which is supreme above the gunas, is the way to rise above the lower nature. Only so can we attain to the movement and status of the Divine,
The sign of such a man, says Krishna, is that equality of which I have so constantly spoken; the sign is that inwardly he regards happiness and suffering alike, gold and mud and stone as of equal value and that to him the pleasant and the unpleasant, praise and blame, honour and insult, the faction of his friends and the faction of his enemies are equal things.
There is an absolute delight which is untouched by rajasic suffering and beyond the sattwic happiness, and these things are found and possessed by dwelling in the being and power of the Supreme Being. But since it is acquired by devotion, its status must be that divine delight in which is experienced the union of utter love and possessing oneness, the crown of devotion. And to rise into that divine delight, into that imperishable oneness must be the completion of spiritual perfection and the fulfilment of the eternal immortalising duty.
21. THE TRINITY
To ascend into the divine nature one must first fix oneself in a perfect spiritual equality and rise above the lower nature of the three qualities. Thus transcending the lower Nature we fix ourselves in the impersonality, the imperturbable superiority to all action, the purity from all definition and limitation by quality which is one side of the manifested nature of the Supreme Being, his manifestation as the eternity and unity of the self .
The Person in the Infinite is not the egoistic, separative, oblivious personality of the lower Nature; it is something exalted, universal and transcendent, immortal and divine. That mystery of the supreme Person is the secret of love and devotion.
Divine in the equality of his imperturbable self-existence, one in it with all objects and creatures, he brings that boundless equality, that deep oneness down into his mind and heart and life and body and founds on it in an indivisible integrality the trinity of divine love, divine works and divine knowledge. This is the Gita's way of salvation.
Absolutely to know it, to seize it in knowledge and experience is to be perfected in the transformed understanding, divinely satisfied in heart and successful in the supreme sense and objective of all will and action and works. It is the way to be immortal, to rise towards the highest divine nature and to assume the eternal Dharma.
22 THE FULLNESS OF SPIRITUAL ACTION
To live inwardly calm, detached, silent in the silence of the impersonal and universal Self and yet do dynamically the works of dynamic Nature, and more largely, to be one with the Eternal within us and to do all the will of the Eternal in the world expressed through a sublimated force, a divine height of the personal nature uplifted, liberated, universalised, made one with God-nature,—this is the Gita’s solution.
The liberated seeker rises personally to that highest Numen by his soul’s love and joy in God and the adoration of the will in him for the Master of its works; the peace and largeness of his impersonal universal knowledge is perfected by delight in the self-existent integral close and intimate reality of this surpassing and universal Godhead. This delight glorifies his knowledge and unites it with the eternal delight of the Spirit in its self and its manifestation; this perfects too his personality in the superperson of the divine Purusha and makes his natural being and action one with eternal beauty, eternal harmony, eternal love and Ananda.
But all this change means a total passing from the lower human to the higher divine nature. Renunciation of desire is the way; it has been said that in whatever way the perfected Yogin lives and acts, he lives and acts in God.
23.
DEVA AND ASURA
The liberated Yogin is delivered from the guna reactions and whatever he does, however he lives, moves and acts in God. Wearied by no striving and straining, it enjoys a free mastery of its means and its objects; misled by no error of the will, it holds a knowledge of self and things which is the source of its Ananda; overcome by no sorrow, sin or pain, it has the joy and purity of its being and of its power.
The Divine nature is distinguished by an acme of the sattwic habits and qualities; self-control, sacrifice, the religious habit, cleanness and purity, candour and straightforwardness, truth, calm and self-denial, compassion to all beings, modesty, gentleness, forgivingness, patience, steadfastness, a deep sweet and serious freedom from all restlessness, levity and inconstancy are its native attributes.
The Animalist man becomes the centre or instrument of a fierce, Titanic, violent action, a power of destruction in the world, a fount of injury and evil. Arrogant, full of self-esteem and the drunkenness of their pride, these misguided souls delude themselves, persist in false and obstinate aims. They imagine that desire and enjoyment are all the aim of life and in their inordinate and insatiable pursuit of it they are the prey of a devouring, a measurelessly unceasing care and thought and endeavour and anxiety till the moment of their death.
All souls are eternal portions of the Divine, the Animalist as well as the Divine, all can come to salvation: even the greatest sinner can turn to the Divine.
24 . THE GUNAS, FAITH AND WORKS
Sattwic sacrifice is that which is done with a highest enlightened faith, as a duty deeply accepted or for some ethical or spiritual or other higher reason and with no desire for any external or narrowly personal fruit in the action.
There is the askesis of mental and moral perfection, and that means the purifying of the whole temperament, gentleness and a clear and calm gladness of mind, self-control and silence. Here comes in all that quiets the rajasic and egoistic nature and all that replaces it by the happy and tranquil principle of good and virtue. This is the askesis of the sattwic duty so highly prized in the system of the ancient Indian culture.
Its greater culmination will be a high purity of the reason and will, an equal soul, a deep peace and calm, a wide sympathy and preparation of oneness, a reflection of the inner soul’s divine gladness in the mind, life and body. And this culmination can be raised into a higher and freer light, can pass away into the settled godlike energy of the supreme nature.
The seekers of liberation indeed do the askesis actions without desire of fruit and only with the idea, feeling, Joy of the absolute Divine behind their nature. It is that which they seek by this purity and impersonality in their works, this high desirelessness, this vast emptiness of ego and plenitude of Spirit. Sat means good and it means existence. All good works are Sat, for they prepare the soul for the higher reality of our being; all firm abiding in sacrifice, giving and askesis and all works done with that central view, as sacrifice, as giving, as askesis, are Sat, for they build the basis for the highest truth of our spirit.
25. THE GUNAS, MIND AND WORKS
The liberated worker who has given up his works by the inner asceticism to a greater Power is free from Karma. The essence of renunciation is a disinterested soul, a selfless mind, the transition from ego to the free impersonal and spiritual nature.
The Gita speaks of the five causes or indispensable requisites for the accomplishment of works. These five are, first, the frame of body, life and mind next, the doer, third, the various instrumentation of Nature, fourth, the many kinds of effort which make up the force of action, and last, Fate, that is to say, the influence of the Power or powers other than the human factors, other than the visible mechanism of Nature, that stand behind these and modify the work and dispose its fruits in the steps of act and consequence.
When we are liberated from ego, our real self behind comes forward, impersonal and universal, and it sees in its self-vision of unity with the universal Spirit universal Nature as the doer of the work and the Divine Will behind as the master of universal Nature.
The self-exceeding of the sattwic nature comes when we get beyond the great but still inferior sattwic pleasure, beyond the pleasures of mental knowledge and virtue and peace to the eternal calm of the self and the spiritual ecstasy of the divine oneness. That spiritual joy is no longer the sattwic happiness, but the absolute Bliss.
Bliss is the secret delight from which all things are born, by which all is sustained in existence and to which all can rise in the spiritual culmination. Only then can it be possessed when the liberated man, free from ego and its desires, lives at last one with his highest self, one with all beings and one with God in an absolute bliss of the spirit.
26 SWABHAVA AND SWADHARMA
Each Jiva possesses in his spiritual nature these four sides, is a soul of knowledge, a soul of strength and of power, a soul of mutuality and interchange, a soul of works and service, but one side or other predominates in the action and expressive spirit and tinges the dealings of the soul with its embodied nature; it leads and gives its stamp to the other powers and uses them for the principal strain of action, tendency, experience. The Swabhava then follows.
To arrive at the sattwic way of the inner individual Swadharma and of the works to which it moves us on the ways of life is a preliminary condition of perfection.
And in the end to arrive at the divinest figure and most dynamic soul-power of this fourfold activity is a wide doorway to a swiftest and largest reality of the highest spiritual perfection. The Gita’s injuncinjunction is to worship the Divine by our own work our offering must be the works determined by our own law of being and nature.
