WE HAVE now got to the inmost kernel of the Gita's Yoga, the
whole living and breathing centre of its teaching. We can see now quite clearly
that the ascent of the limited human soul when it withdraws from the ego and
the lower nature into the immutable Self calm, silent and stable, was only a
first step, an initial change. And now too we can see why the Gita from the
first insisted on the Ishwara, the Godhead in the human form, who speaks always
of himself, “aham, mām,” as of some great secret and
omnipresent Being, lord of all the worlds and master of the human soul, one who
is greater even than that immutable self-existence which is still and unmoved
for ever and abides for ever untouched by the subjective and objective appearances
of the natural universe.
All Yoga is a seeking after the Divine, a turn
towards union with the Eternal. According to the adequacy of our perception of
the Divine and the Eternal will be the way of the seeking, the depth and
fullness of the union and the integrality of the realisation. Man, the mental
being, approaches the Infinite through his finite mind and has to open some near
gate of this finite upon that Infinite. He seeks for some conception on which
his mind is able to seize, selects some power of his nature which by force of
an absolute self-heightening can reach out and lay its touch on the infinite
Truth that in itself is beyond his mental comprehension. Some face of that
infinite Truth – for, because it is infinite, it has numberless faces, words of
its meaning, self-suggestions – he attempts to see, so that by attaching
himself to it he can arrive through direct experience to the immeasurable
reality it figures. However narrow the gate may be, he is satisfied if it
offers some prospect into the wideness which attracts him, if it sets him on
the way to the fathomless profundity and unreachable heights of that which
calls to his spirit. And as he
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approaches it, so it receives
him, ye yathāmāmprapadyante.
Philosophic mind attempts to attain to the
Eternal by an abstractive knowledge. The business of knowledge is to comprehend
and for the finite intellect that means to define and determine. But the only
way to determine the indeterminable is by some kind of universal negation, netineti.
Therefore the mind proceeds to exclude from the conception of the Eternal all
that offers itself as limitable by the senses and the heart and the
understanding. An entire opposition is made between the Self and the not-self,
between an eternal, immutable, indefinable self-existence and all forms of existence,
– between Brahman and Maya, between the ineffable Reality and all that
undertakes to express, but cannot express the Ineffable, – between Karma and
Nirvana, between the ever continuous but ever impermanent action and conception
of the universal Energy and some absolute ineffable supreme Negation of its
action and conception which is empty of all life and mentality and dynamic
significance. That strong drive of knowledge towards the Eternal leads away from
everything that is transient. It negates life in order to return to its source,
cuts away from us all that we seem to be in order to get from it to the
nameless and impersonal reality of our being. The desires of the heart, the
works of the will and the conceptions of the mind are rejected; even in the end
knowledge itself is negated and abolished in the Identical and Unknowable. By
the way of an increasing quietude ending in an absolute passivity the Maya-created
soul or the bundle of associations we call ourselves enters into annihilation
of its idea of personality, makes an end of the lie of living, disappears into
Nirvana.
But this difficult abstractive method of
self-negation, however it may draw to it some exceptional natures, cannot
satisfy universally the embodied soul in man, because it does not give an
outlet to all the straining of his complex nature towards the perfect Eternal.
Not only his abstracting contemplative intellect but his yearning heart, his
active will, his positive mind in search of some Truth to which his existence
and the existence of the world is a manifold key, have their straining towards the
Eternal and Infinite and seek to find in it their divine Source and the
justificationof their being and their
nature. From this need arise
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the religions of love and works, whose
strength is that they satisfy and lead Godwards the most active and developed
powers of our humanity, – for only by starting from these can knowledge be effective.
Even Buddhism with its austere and uncompromising negation both of subjective
self and objective things had still to found itself initially on a divine
discipline of works and to admit as a substitute for bhakti the spiritualised
emotionalism of a universal love and compassion, since so only could it become
an effective way for mankind, a truly liberating religion. Even illusionist
Mayavada with its ultra-logical intolerance of action and the creations of
mentality had to allow a provisional and practical reality to man and the
universe and to God in the world in order to have a first foothold and a
feasible starting-point; it had to affirm what it denied in order to give some
reality to man's bondage and to his effort for liberation.
But the weakness of the kinetic and the
emotional religions is that they are too much absorbed in some divine Personality
and in the divine values of the finite. And, even when they have a conception
of the infinite Godhead, they do not give us the full satisfaction of knowledge
because they do not follow it out into its most ultimate and supernal
tendencies. These religions fall short of a complete absorption in the Eternal
and the perfect union by identity, – and yet to that identity in some other
way, if not in the abstractive, since there all oneness has its basis, the
spirit that is in man must one day arrive. On the other hand, the weakness of a
contemplative quietistic spirituality is that it arrives at this result by a
too absolute abstraction and in the end it turns into a nothing or a fiction
the human soul whose aspiration was yet all the time the whole sense of this
attempt at union; for without the soul and its aspiration liberation and union
could have no meaning. The little that this way of thinking recognises of his
other powers of existence, it relegates to an inferior preliminary action which
never arrives at any full or satisfying realisation in the Eternal and
Infinite. Yet these things too which it restricts unduly, the potent will, the
strong yearning of love, the positive light and all-embracing intuition of the
conscious mental being are from the Divine, represent essential powers of him
and must have some justification in their
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Source and some dynamic way of
self-fulfilment in him. No God-knowledge can be integral, perfect or
universally satisfying which leaves unfulfilled their absolute claim, no wisdom
utterly wise which in its intolerant asceticism of search negates or in the
pride of pure knowledge belittles the spiritual reality behind these ways of
the Godhead.
The greatness of the central thought of the
Gita in which all its threads are gathered up and united, consists in the synthetic
value of a conception which recognises the whole nature of the soul of man in
the universe and validates by a large and wise unification its many-sided need
of the supreme and infinite Truth, Power, Love, Being to which our humanity turns
in its search for perfection and immortality and some highest joy and power and
peace. There is a strong and wide endeavour towards a comprehensive spiritual
view of God and man and universal existence. Not indeed that everything without
any exception is seized in these eighteen chapters, no spiritual problem left
for solution; but still so large a scheme is laid out that we have only to fill
in, to develop, to modify, to stress, to follow out points, to work out hint
and illuminate adumbration in order to find a clue to any further claim of our
intelligence and need of our spirit. The Gita itself does not evolve any quite
novel solution out of its own questionings. To arrive at the comprehensiveness
at which it aims, it goes back behind the great philosophical systems to the
original Vedanta of the Upanishads; for there we have the widest and profoundest
extant synthetic vision of spirit and man and cosmos. But what is in the
Upanishads undeveloped to the intelligence because wrapped up in a luminous
kernel of intuitive vision and symbolic utterance, the Gita brings out in the light
of a later intellectual thinking and distinctive experience.
In the frame of
its synthesis it admits the seeking of the abstractive thinkers for the
Indefinable, anirdeśyam, the
ever unmanifest Immutable, avyaktamaksaram. Those who devote
themselves to this search, find, they also, the Purushottama, the supreme
Divine Person, mām, the Spirit
and highest Soul and Lord of things. For his utmost self-existent way of being
is indeed an unthinkable, acintyarūpam,
an unimaginable positive,
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an absolute quintessence of all absolutes
far beyond the determination of the intelligence. The method of negative passivity,
quietude, renunciation of life and works by which men feel after this
intangible Absolute is admitted and ratified in the Gita's philosophy, but only
with a minor permissive sanction. This negating knowledge approaches the
Eternal by one side only of the truth and that side the most difficult to reach
and follow for the embodied soul in Nature, duhkhamdehavadbhiravāpyate; it proceeds by a highly specialised, even an
unnecessarily arduous way, “narrow and difficult to tread as a razor's edge.”
Not by denying all relations, but through all relations is the Divine Infinite
naturally approachable to man and most easily, widely, intimately seizable.
This seeing is not after all the largest or the truest truth that the Supreme
is without any relations with the mental, vital, physical existence of man in
the universe, avyavahāryam, nor
that what is described as the empirical truth of things, the truth of
relations, vyavahāra, is
altogether the opposite of the highest spiritual truth, paramārtha. On the contrary there are a thousand relations by
which the supreme Eternal is secretly in contact and union with our human
existence and by all essential ways of our nature and of the world's nature, sarva-bhāvena, can that contact be made sensible and that union made
real to our soul, heart, will, intelligence, spirit. Therefore is this other
way natural and easy for man, sukhamāptum. God does not make himself
difficult of approach to us: only one thing is needed, one demand made on us,
the single indomitable will to break through the veil of our ignorance and the
whole, the persistent seeking of the mind and heart and life for that which is
all the time near to it, within it, its own soul of being and spiritual essence
and the secret of its personality and its impersonality, its self and its
nature. This is our one difficulty; the rest the Master of our existence will
himself see to and accomplish, aham tvāmmoksayisyāmima śsucah.
In the very part of its teaching in which the
Gita's synthesis leans most towards the side of pure knowledge, we have seen
that it constantly prepares for this fuller truth and more pregnant experience.
Indeed, it is implied in the very form the Gita gives to the realisation of the
self-existent Immutable. That
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immutable Self of all existences
seems indeed to stand back from any active intervention in the workings of
Nature; but it is not void of all relation whatever and remote from all connection.
It is our witness and supporter; it gives a silent and impersonal sanction; it
has even an impassive enjoyment. The many-sided action of Nature is still
possible even when the soul is poised in that calm self-existence: for the
witness soul is the immutable Purusha, and Purusha has always some relation
with Prakriti. But now the reason of this double aspect of silence and of
activity is revealed in its entire significance, – because the silent
all-pervading Self is only one side of the truth of the divine Being. He who
pervades the world as the one unchanging self that supports all its mutations,
is equally the Godhead in man, the Lord in the heart of every creature, the
conscient Cause and Master of all our subjective becoming and all our
inward-taking and outward-going objectivised action. The Ishwara of the Yogins
is one with the Brahman of the seeker of knowledge, one supreme and universal
Spirit, one supreme and universal Godhead.
This Godhead is not the limited personal God
of so many exoteric religions; for those are all only partial and outward formations
of this other, this creative and directive, this personal side of his complete
truth of existence. This is the one supreme Person, Soul, Being, Purusha of
whom all godheads are aspects, all individual personality a limited development
in cosmic Nature. This Godhead is not a particularised name and form of
Divinity, ista-devatā, constructed by the
intelligence or embodying the special aspiration of the worshipper. All such
names and forms are only powers and faces of the one Deva who is the universal
Lord of all worshippers and all religions: but this is itself that universal
Deity, deva-deva. This Ishwara is not a reflection of the impersonal and
indeterminable Brahman in illusive Maya: for from beyond all cosmos as well as
within it he rules and is the Lord of the worlds and their creatures. He is Parabrahman
who is Parameshwara, supreme Lord because he is the supreme Self and Spirit,
and from his highest original existence he originates and governs the universe,
not self-deceived, but with an all-knowing omnipotence. Nor is the working
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of his divine Nature in the
cosmos an illusion whether of his or our consciousness. The only illusive Maya
is the ignorance of the lower Prakriti which is not a creator of non-existent
things on the impalpable background of the One and Absolute, but because of its
blind encumbered and limited working misrepresents to the human mind by the
figure of ego and other inadequate figures of mind, life and matter the greater
sense, the deeper realities of existence. There is a supreme, a divine Nature
which is the true creatrix of the universe. All creatures and all objects are
becomings of the one divine Being; all life is a working of the power of the
one Lord; all nature is a manifestation of the one Infinite. He is the Godhead
in man; the Jiva is spirit of his Spirit. He is the Godhead in the universe;
this world in Space and Time is his phenomenal self-extension.
In the unrolling
of this comprehensive vision of existence and super-existence the Yoga of the
Gita finds its unified significance and unexampled amplitude. This supreme
Godhead is the one unchanging imperishable Self in all that is; therefore to
the spiritual sense of this unchanging imperishable self man has to awake and
to unify with it his inner impersonal being. He is the Godhead in man who
originates and directs all his workings; therefore man has to awake to the Godhead
within himself, to know the divinity he houses, to rise out of all that veils
and obscures it and to become united with this inmost Self of his self, this
greater consciousness of his consciousness, this hidden Master of all his will
and works, this Being within him who is the fount and object of all his various
becoming. He is the Godhead whose divine nature, origin of all that we are, is
thickly veiled by these lower natural derivations; therefore man has to get
back from his lower apparent existence, imperfect and mortal, to his essential
divine nature of immortality and perfection. This Godhead is one in all things that
are, the self who lives in all and the self in whom all live and move;
therefore man has to discover his spiritual unity with all creatures, to see
all in the self and the self in all beings, even to see all things and creatures
as himself, ātmaupamyenasarvatra, and accordingly think, feel
and act in all his mind, will and living. This Godhead is the origin of all
that is here or elsewhere and by his Nature he has
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become all these innumerable
existences, abhūtsarvabhūtāni; therefore man
has to see and adore the One in all things animate and inanimate, to worship
the manifestation in sun and star and flower, in man and every living creature,
in the forms and forces, qualities and powers of Nature, vāsudevahsarvamiti. He has to make himself by divine
vision and divine sympathy and finally by a strong inner identity one
universality with the universe. A passive relationless identity excludes love
and action, but this larger and richer oneness fulfils itself by works and by a
pure emotion: it becomes the source and continent and substance and motive and divine
purpose of all our acts and feelings. Kasmaidevāyahavisāvidhema,
to what Godhead shall we give all our life and activities as an offering? This
is that Godhead, this the Lord who claims our sacrifice. A passive relationless
identity excludes the joy of adoration and devotion; but bhakti is the very
soul and heart and summit of this richer, completer, more intimate union. This
Godhead is the fulfilment of all relations, father, mother, lover, friend and
refuge of the soul of every creature. He is the one supreme and universal Deva,
Atman, Purusha, Brahman, Ishwara of the secret wisdom. He has manifested the
world in himself in all these ways by his divine Yoga: its multitudinous
existences are one in him and he is one in them in many aspects. To awaken to
the revelation of him in all these ways together is man's side of the same
divine Yoga.
To make it
perfectly and indisputably clear that this is the supreme and entire truth of
his teaching, this the integral knowledge which he had promised to reveal, the
divine Avatar declares, in a brief reiteration of the upshot of all that he has
been saying, that this and no other is his supreme word, paramamvacah.
“Again hearken to my supreme word,” bhūyaeva śrnumeparamamvacah. This supreme word of the Gita is, we find, first the
explicit and unmistakable declaration that the highest worship and highest
knowledge of the Eternal are the knowledge and the adoration of him as the
supreme and divine Origin of all that is in existence and the mighty Lord of
the world and its peoples of whose being all things are the becomings. It is, secondly,
the declaration of a unified knowledge and bhakti as the supreme Yoga; that is
the destined and the natural way given to
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man to arrive at union with the eternal
Godhead. And to make more significant this definition of the way, to give an illuminating
point to this highest importance of bhakti founded upon and opening to
knowledge and made the basis and motive-power for divinely appointed works, the
acceptance of it by the heart and mind of the disciple is put as a condition for
the farther development by which the final command to action comes at last to
be given to the human instrument, Arjuna. “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,” teprīyamānāyavaksyāmi. For this delight
of the heart in God is the whole constituent and essence of true Bhakti, bhajantiprītipūrvakam. As soon as the supreme word is given,
Arjuna is made to utter his acceptance of it and to ask for a practical way of
seeing God in all things in Nature, and from that question immediately and
naturally there develops the vision of the Divine as the Spirit of the universe
and there arises the tremendous command to the world-action.¹
The idea of the
Divine on which the Gita insists as the secret of the whole mystery of
existence, the knowledge that leads to liberation, is one that bridges the
opposition between the cosmic procession in Time and a supracosmic eternity without
denying either of them or taking anything from the reality of either. It
harmonises the pantheistic, the theistic and the highest transcendental terms
of our spiritual conception and spiritual experience. The Divine is the unborn
Eternal who has no origin; there is and can be nothing before him from which he
proceeds, because he is one and timeless and absolute.
“Neither the gods nor the great
Rishis know any birth of me. . . .He
who knows me as the unborn without origin . . .” are the opening utterances of
this supreme word. And it gives the high promise that this knowledge, not
limiting, not intellectual, but pure and spiritual, – for the form and nature,
if we can use such language, of this transcendental Being, his svarūpa, are necessarily
unthinkable by the mind, acintyarūpa,
– rtes mortal man from all confusion of ignorance and from all bondage of sin,
suffering and evil, yovettiasammūdhahsamartyesusarva-papaihpramucyate. The human
¹Gita,x.1-18.
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soul that can dwell in the light of this
supreme spiritual knowledge is lifted by it beyond the ideative or sensible
formulations of the universe. It rises into the ineffable power of an
all-exceeding, yet all-fulfilling identity, the same beyond and here. This
spiritual experience of the transcendental Infinite breaks down the limitations
of the pantheistic conception of existence. The infinite of a cosmic monism
which makes God and the universe one, tries to imprison the Divine in his world
manifestation and leaves us that as our sole possible means of knowing him; but
this experience liberates us into the timeless and spaceless Eternal. “Neither
the Gods nor the Titans know thy manifestation” cries Arjuna in his reply: the
whole universe or even numberless universes cannot manifest him, cannot contain
his ineffable light and infinite greatness. All other lesser God-knowledge has
its truth only by dependence on the ever unmanifested and ineffable reality of
the transcendent Godhead.
But at the same time the divine Transcendence
is not a negation, nor is it an Absolute empty of all relation to the universe.
It is a supreme positive, it is an absolute of all absolutes. All cosmic
relations derive from this Supreme; all cosmic existences return to it and find
in it alone their true and immeasurable existence. “For I am altogether and in every
way the origin of the gods and the great Rishis.” The gods are the great
undying Powers and immortal Personalities who consciously inform, constitute,
preside over the subjective and objective forces of the cosmos. The gods are
spiritual forms of the eternal and original Deity who descend from him into the
many processes of the world. Multitudinous, universal, the gods weave out of
the primary principles of being and its thousand complexities the whole web of
this diversified existence of the One. All their own existence, nature, power,
process proceeds in every way, in every principle, in its every strand from the
truth of the transcendent Ineffable. Nothing is independently created here,
nothing is caused self-sufficiently by these divine agents; everything finds
its origin, cause, first spiritual reason for being and will to be in the
absolute and supreme Godhead, – ahamādihsarvaśah. Nothing in the universe has its real cause
in the universe; all proceeds from this supernal Existence.
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The great
Rishis, called here as in the Veda the seven original Seers, maharsayah saptapūrve, the seven Ancients of the world, are
intelligence-powers of that divine Wisdom which has evolved all things out of
its own self-conscious infinitude, prajñāpurānī, – developed
them down the range of the seven principles of its own essence. These Rishis embody
the all-upholding, all-illumining, all-manifesting seven Thoughts of the Veda, saptadhiyah, – the Upanishad speaks of all things as being
arranged in septettes, saptasapta. Along with these are coupled the
four eternal Manus, fathers of man, – for the active nature of the Godhead is
fourfold and humanity expresses this nature in its fourfold character. These also,
as their name implies, are mental beings. Creators of all this life that
depends on manifest or latent mind for its action, from them are all these
living creatures in the world; all are their children and offspring, yesāmlokaimāhprajāh. And these great
Rishis and these Manus are themselves perpetual mental becomings of the supreme
Soul¹ and born out of his
spiritual transcendence into cosmic Nature, – originators, but he the origin of
all that originates in the universe. Spirit of all spirits, Soul of all souls,
Mind of all mind, Life of all life, Substance of all form, this transcendent Absolute
is no complete opposite of all we are, but on the contrary the originating and
illuminating Absolute of all the principles and powers of our and the world's
being and nature.
This
transcendent Origin of our existence is not separated from us by any
unbridgeable gulf and does not disown the creatures that derive from him or
condemn them to be only the figment of an illusion. He is the Being, all are
his becomings. He does not create out of a void, out of a Nihil or out of an
unsubstantial matrix of dream. Out of himself he creates, in himself he
becomes; all are in his being and all is of his being. This truth admits and
exceeds the pantheistic seeing of things. Vasudeva is all, vāsudevah sarvam, but Vasudeva is all that appears in
the cosmos because he is too all that does notappear in it,all that is never
manifested. His being is in no way limited by his becomings; he is in no degree
bound by this world of relations. Even in becoming all heis still a Transcendence; even in assuming
finite
¹mad-bhāvāh mānasājātāh.
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forms he is always the Infinite. Nature,
Prakriti, is in her essence his spiritual power, self-power, ātmaśakti; this spiritual
self-power develops infinite primal qualities of becoming in the inwardness of
things and turns them into an external surface of form and action. For in her
essential, secret and divine order the spiritual truth of each and all comes
first, a thing of her deep identities; their psychological truth of quality and
nature is dependent on the spiritual for all in it that is authentic, it
derives from the spirit; least in necessity, last in order the objective truth
of form and action derives from inner quality of nature and depends on it for
all these variable presentations of existence here in the external order. Or in
other words, the objective fact is only an expression of a sum of soul factors
and these go back always to a spiritual cause of their appearance.
This finite outward becoming is an expressive
phenomenon of the divine Infinite. Nature is, secondarily, the lower Nature, a
subordinate variable development of a few selective combinations out of the
many possibilities of the Infinite. Evolved out of essential and psychological
quality of being and becoming, svabhāva,
these combinations of form and energy, action and movement exist for a quite
limited relation and mutual experience in the cosmic oneness. And in this lower,
outward and apparent order of things Nature as an expressive power of the
Godhead is disfigured by the perversions of an obscure cosmic Ignorance and her
divine significances lost in the materialised, separative and egoistic
mechanism of our mental and vital experience. But still here also all is from
the supreme Godhead, a birth, a becoming, an evolution,¹ a process of development through action of Nature
out of the Transcendent. Ahamsarvasyaprabhavomattahsarvampravartate; “I am the birth of everything and from me all proceeds
into development of action and movement.” Not only is this true of all that we
call good or praise and recognise as divine, all that is luminous, sattwic,
ethical, peace-giving, spiritually joy-giving, “understanding and knowledge and
freedom from the bewilderment of the Ignorance, forgiveness and truth and
self-government and calm of inner control, non-injuring and equality,
contentment and austerity and giving.”
¹prabhava, bhāva, pravrtti.
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It is true also of the oppositions that
perplex the mortal mind and bring in ignorance and its bewilderment, “grief and
pleasure, coming into being and destruction, fear and fearlessness, glory and
ingloriousness” with all the rest of the interplay of light and darkness, all
the myriad mixed threads that quiver so painfully and yet with a constant
stimulation through the entanglement of our nervous mind and its ignorant
subjectivities. All here in their separate diversities are subjective becomings
of existences in the one great Becoming and they get their birth and being from
Him who transcends them. The Transcendent knows and originates these things,
but is not caught as in a web in that diversified knowledge and is not overcome
by his creation. We must observe here the emphatic collocation of the three
words from the verb bhū, to become,
bhavanti, bhavāh, bhūtānām.
All existences are becomings of the Divine, bhūtāni;
all subjective states and movements are his and their psychological becomings, bhāvāh. These even,
our lesser subjective conditions and their apparent results no less than the
highest spiritual states, are all becomings from the supreme Being, ¹bhavantimattaeva. The Gita recognises and stresses
the distinction between Being and becoming, but does not turn it into an
opposition. For that would be to abrogate the universal oneness. The Godhead is
one in his transcendence, one all-supporting Self of things, one in the unity
of his cosmic nature. These three are one Godhead; all derives from him, all
becomes from his being, all is eternal portion or temporal expression of the
Eternal. In the Transcendence, in the Absolute, if we are to follow the Gita,
we must look, not for a supreme negation of all things, but for the positive
key of their mystery, the reconciling secret of their existence.
But there is
another supreme reality of the Infinite that must also be recognised as an
indispensable element of the liberating knowledge. This reality is that of the
transcendent downlook as well as the close immanent presence of the divine government
of the universe. The Supreme who becomes all
¹Cf. the Upanishad, ātmā eva abhut sarvani bhutāni, the Self has become
all existences, with this contained significance in the choice of the words,
the Self-existent has become all these becomings.
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creation, yet infinitely
transcends it, is not a will-less cause aloof from his creation. He is not an
involuntary originator who disowns all responsibility for these results of his
universal Power or casts them upon an illusive consciousness entirely different
from his own or leaves them to a mechanical Law or to a Demiurge or to a
Manichean conflict of Principles. He is not an aloof and indifferent Witness
who waits impassively for all to abolish itself or return to its unmoved
original principle. He is the mighty lord of the worlds and peoples, loka-maheśvara,
and governs all not only from within but from above, from his supreme
transcendence. Cosmos cannot be governed by a Power that does not transcend
cosmos. A divine government implies the free mastery of an omnipotent Ruler and
not an automatic force or mechanical law of determinative becoming limited by
the apparent nature of the cosmos. This is the theistic seeing of the universe,
but it is no shrinking and gingerly theism afraid of the world's
contradictions, but one which sees God as the omniscient and omnipotent, the
sole original Being who manifests in himself all, whatever it may be, good and
evil, pain and pleasure, light and darkness as stuff of his own existence and
governs himself what in himself he has manifested. Unaffected by its
oppositions, unbound by his creation, exceeding, yet intimately related to this
Nature and closely one with her creatures, their Spirit, Self, highest Soul,
Lord, Lover, Friend, Refuge, he is ever leading them from within them and from
above through the mortal appearances of ignorance and suffering and sin and
evil, ever leading each through his nature and all through universal Nature
towards a supreme light and bliss and immortality and transcendence. This is
the fullness of the liberating knowledge. It is a knowledge of the Divine
within us and in the world as at the same time a transcendent Infinite. An Absolute
who has become all that is by his divine Nature, his effective power of Spirit,
he governs all from his transcendence. He is intimately present within every
creature and the cause, ruler, director of all cosmic happenings and yet is he
far too great, mighty and infinite to be limited by his creation.
This character of the knowledge is emphasised
in three separate verses of promise. “Whosoever knows me,” says the
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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. . . . Whosoever knows in its
right principles this my pervading lordship and this my Yoga (the divine Yoga, aiśvarayoga, by which the Transcendent is one with all existences, even
while more than them all, and dwells in them and contains them as becomings of
his own Nature), unites himself to me by an untrembling Yoga. . . . 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 give them the Yoga of the understanding
by which they come to me and I destroy for them the darkness which is born of
the ignorance.” These results must arise inevitably from the very nature of the
knowledge and from the very nature of the Yoga which converts that knowledge
into spiritual growth and spiritual experience. For all the perplexity of man's
mind and action, all the stumbling, insecurity and affliction of his mind, his
will, his ethical turn, his emotional, sensational and vital urgings can be
traced back to the groping and bewildered cognition and volition natural to his
sense-obscured mortal mind in the body, sammoha.
But when he sees the divine Origin of all things, when he looks steadily from
the cosmic appearance to its transcendent Reality and back from that Reality to
the appearance, he is then delivered from this bewilderment of the mind, will,
heart and senses, he walks enlightened and free, asammūdhahmartyesu.
Assigning to everything its supernal and real and not any longer only its
present and apparent value, he finds the hidden links and connections; he
consciously directs all life and act to their high and true object and governs
them by the light and power which comes to him from the Godhead within him. Thus
he escapes from the wrong cognition, the wrong mental and volitional reaction,
the wrong sensational reception and impulse which here originate sin and error
and suffering, sarva-pāpaihpramucyate. For living thus in the transcendent and universal he
sees his own and every other individuality in their greater values and is
released from the falsehood and ignorance of his separative and egoistic will
and knowledge.
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That is always the essence of the
spiritual liberation.
The wisdom of the liberated man is not then,
in the view of the Gita, a consciousness of abstracted and unrelated impersonality,
a do-nothing quietude. For the mind and soul of the liberated man are firmly
settled in a constant sense, an integral feeling of the pervasion of the world
by the actuating and directing presence of the divine Master of the universe, etāmvibhūtimmamayovetti.
He is aware of his spirit's transcendence of the cosmic order, but he is aware
also of his oneness with it by the divine Yoga, yogamcamama. And he sees each aspect of the
transcendent, the cosmic and the individual existence in its right relation to
the supreme Truth and puts all in their right place in the unity of the divine
Yoga. He no longer sees each thing in its separateness, – the separate seeing
that leaves all either unexplained or one-sided to the experiencing consciousness.
Nor does he see all confusedly together, – the confused seeing that gives a
wrong light and a chaotic action. Secure in the transcendence, he is not
affected by the cosmic stress and the turmoil of Time and circumstance.
Untroubled in the midst of all this creation and destruction of things, his
spirit adheres to an unshaken and untrembling, an unvacillating Yoga of union
with the eternal and spiritual in the universe. He watches through it all the
divine persistence of the Master of the Yoga and acts out of a tranquil
universality and oneness with all things and creatures. And this close contact
with all things implies no involution of soul and mind in the separative lower
nature, because his basis of spiritual experience is not the inferior phenomenal
form and movement but the inner All and the supreme Transcendence. He becomes
of like nature and law of being with the Divine, sādharmyam āgatāh, transcendent even in
universality of spirit, universal even in the individuality of mind, life and
body. By this Yoga once perfected, undeviating and fixed, avikampena yogena yujyate, he is able to take up whatever poise of
nature, assume whatever human condition, do whatever world-action without any
fall from his oneness with the divine Self, without any loss of his constant
communion with the Master of existence.¹
¹sarvathāvartamano'pisayogīmayivartate.
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This knowledge
translated into the affective, emotional, temperamental plane becomes a calm
love and intense adoration of the original and transcendental Godhead above us,
the ever-present Master of all things here, God in man, God in Nature. It is at
first a wisdom of the intelligence, the buddhi;
but that is accompanied by a moved spiritualised state of the affective nature,¹bhāva. This change of the heart and mind is the beginning of a
total change of all the nature. A new inner birth and becoming prepares us for
oneness with the supreme object of our love and adoration, madbhāvāya. There is an intense delight of love in the
greatness and beauty and perfection of this divine Being now seen everywhere in
the world and above it, prīti.
That deeper ecstasy assumes the place of the scattered and external pleasure of
the mind in existence or rather it draws all other delight into it and
transforms by a marvellous alchemy the mind's and the heart's feelings and all
sense movements. The whole consciousness becomes full of the Godhead and
replete with his answering consciousness; 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 a continual union from moment to moment in the thought and
memory, there is an unbroken continuity of the experience of oneness in the
spirit. And from the moment that this inner state begins, even in the stage of
imperfection, the Divine confirms it by the perfect Yoga of the will and
intelligence. He uplifts the blazing lamp of knowledge within us, he destroys the
ignorance of the separative mind and will, he stands revealed in the human
spirit. By the Yoga of the will and intelligence founded on an illumined union
of works and knowledge the transition was effected from our lower troubled mind-ranges
to the immutable calm of the witnessing Soul above the active nature. But now
by this greater yoga of the Buddhi founded on an illumined union of love and
adoration with an all-comprehending knowledge the soul rises in a vast ecstasy
to the whole transcendental truth
¹budhābhāva-samanvitāh.
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of the absolute and
all-originating Godhead. The Eternal is fulfilled in the individual spirit and
individual nature; the individual spirit is exalted from birth in time to the
infinitudes of the Eternal.
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Works of The Mother
Words of The Mother
Question and Answers, Answers of The Mother
Prayers and Meditations
Flowers – Messages and Spiritual Significance
Mother’s Reading of Savitri
The Mother – Misc Audio
Audio – The Mother’s Recorded Conversations with French Disciple Satprem