SIX
Works, Devotion
and Knowledge
THIS then is the integral truth, the highest and widest
knowledge. The Divine is supracosmic, the eternal Parabrahman who supports with
his timeless and spaceless existence all this cosmic manifestation of his own
being and nature in Space and Time. He is the supreme spirit who ensouls the
forms and movements of the universe, Paramatman. He is the supernal Person of
whom all self and nature, all being and becoming in this or any universe are
the self-conception and the self-energising, Purushottama. He is the ineffable
Lord of all existence who by his spiritual control of his own manifested Power
in Nature unrolls the cycles of the world and the natural evolution of
creatures in the cycles, Parameshwara. From him the Jiva, individual spirit,
soul in Nature, existent by his being, conscious by the light of his
consciousness, empowered to knowledge, to will and to action by his will and
power, enjoying existence by his divine enjoyment of the cosmos, has come here
into the cosmic rounds.
The inner soul in man is here a partial
self-manifestation of the Divine, self-limited for the works of his Nature in
the universe, prakrtir īiva-bhūgtā. In his spiritual essence the individual is one
with the Divine. In the works of the divine Prakriti he is one with him, yet
there is an operative difference and many deep relations with God in Nature and
with God above cosmic Nature. In the works of the lower appearance of Prakriti
he seems by an ignorance and egoistic separation to be quite other than the One
and to think, will, act, enjoy in this separative consciousness for the
egoistic pleasure and purpose of his personal existence in the universe and its
surface relations with other embodied minds and lives. But in fact all his
being, all his thinking, all his willing and action and enjoyment are only a
reflection – egoistic and perverted so long as he is in the ignorance – of the Divine’s
being, the Divine’s thought, will, action and enjoyment of Nature. To get
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back to this truth of himself is his direct means
of salvation, his largest and nearest door of escape from subjection to the
Ignorance. Since he is a spirit, a soul with a nature of mind and reason, of
will and dynamic action, of emotion and sensation and life’s seeking for the
delight of existence, it is by turning all these powers Godwards that the
return to the highest truth of himself can be made entirely possible. He must
know with the knowledge of the supreme Self and Brahman; he must turn his love
and adoration to the supreme Person; he must subject his will and works to the
supreme Lord of cosmos. Then he passes from the lower to the divine Nature: he
casts from him the thought and will and works of the Ignorance and thinks,
wills and works in his divine dentity as soul of that Soul, power and light of
that Spirit; he enjoys all the inner infinite of the Divine and no longer only
these outward touches, masks and appearances. Thus divinely living, thus
directing his whole self and soul, and nature Godwards, he is taken
To
know Vasudeva as all and live in that knowledge is the secret. He knows him as
the Self, immutable, continent of all as well as immanent in all things. He
draws back from the confused and perturbed whirl of the lower nature to dwell
in the still and inalienable calm and light of the self-existent spirit. There
he realises a constant unity with this self of the Divine that is present in
all existences and supports all cosmic movement and action and phenomenon. He
looks upward from this eternal unchanging spiritual hypostasis of the mutable
universe to the greater Eternal, the supracosmic, the Real. He knows him as the
divine Inhabitant in all things that are, the Lord in the heart of man, the
secret Ishwara, and removes the veil between his natural being and this inner
spiritual Master of his being. He makes his will, thought and works one in knowledge
with the Ishwara’s, attuned by an ever-present realisation to the sense of the
indwelling Divinity, sees and adores him in all and changes the whole human
action to the highest meaning of the divine nature. He knows him as the source
and the substance of all that is around him in the universe. All things that
are he sees as at once in their appearance the veils and in their secret trend
the means and signs of
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self-manifestation
of that one unthinkable Reality and everywhere discovers that oneness, Brahman,
Purusha, Atman, Vasudeva, the Being that has become all these creatures.
Therefore too his whole inner existence comes into tune and harmony with the
Infinite now self-revealed in all that lives or is within and around him and
his whole outer existence turns into an exact instrumentation of the cosmic
purpose. He looks up through the Self to the Parabrahman who there and here is
the one and only existence. He looks up through the divine Inhabitant in all to
that supernal Person who in his supreme status is beyond all habitation. He
looks up through the Lord manifested in the universe to the Supreme who exceeds
and rules all his manifestation. Thus he arises through a limitless unfolding
of knowledge and upward vision and aspiration to that to which he has turned
with an all-compelling integrality, sarvabhāvena.
This integral turning of the soul Godwards
bases royally the Gita’s synthesis of knowledge and works and devotion. To know
God thus integrally is to know him as One in the self and in all manifestation
and beyond all manifestation, – and all this unitedly and at once. 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 companioned by an aspiration and vivified by an uplifting is no true
knowledge, for it can be only an intellectual seeing and a barren cognitive
endeavour. The vision of God brings infallibly the adoration and passionate
seeking of the Divine, – a passion for the Divine in his self-existent being,
but also for the Divine in ourselves and for the Divine in all that is. To know
with the intellect is simply to understand and may be an effective
starting-point, – or, too, it may not be, and it will not be if there is no
sincerity in the knowledge, no urge towards inner realisation in the will, no power
upon the soul, no call in the spirit: for that would mean that the brain has externally
understood, but inwardly the soul has seen nothing. True knowledge is to know
with the inner being, and when the inner being is touched by the light, then it
arises to embrace that which is seen, it yearns to possess, it struggles to
shape that in itself and itself to it, it
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labours to
become one with the glory of its vision. Knowledge in this sense is an
awakening to identity and, since the inner being realises itself by
consciousness and delight, by love, by possession and oneness with whatever of
itself it has seen, knowledge awakened must bring an overmastering impulse
towards this true and only perfect realisation. Here that which is known is not
an externalised object, but the divine Purusha, self and lord of all that we
are. An all-seizing delight in him and a deep and moved love and adoration of
him must be the inevitable result and is the very soul of this knowledge. And
this adoration is no isolated seeking of the heart, but an offering of the
whole existence. Therefore it must take also the form of a sacrifice; there is
a giving of all our works to the Ishwara, there is a surrender of all our
active inward and outward nature to the Godhead of our adoration in its every
subjective and in its every objective movement. All our subjective workings
move in him and they seek him, the Lord and Self, as the source and goal of
their power and endeavour. All our objective workings move out towards him in
the world and make him their object, initiate a service of God in the world of
which the controlling power is the Divinity within us in whom we are one self
with the universe and its creatures. For both world and self, Nature and the
soul in her are enlightened by the consciousness of the One, are inner and
outer bodies of the transcendent Purushottama. So comes a synthesis of mind and
heart and will in the one self and spirit and with it the synthesis of
knowledge, love and works in this integral union, this embracing God-realisation,
this divine Yoga.
But to arrive at this movement at all is
difficult for the ego-bound nature. And to arrive at its victorious and
harmonious integrality is not easy even when we have set our feet on the way
finally and for ever. Mortal mind is bewildered by its ignorant reliance upon
veils and appearances; it sees only the outward human body, human mind, human
way of living and catches no liberating glimpse of the Divinity who is lodged
in the creature. It ignores the divinity within itself and cannot see it in
other men, and even though the Divine manifest himself in humanity as Avatar
and Vibhuti, it is still blind and ignores or despises the veiled Godhead, avajānanti mām mūdhā
mānusīm tanum āśritam
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And if it
ignores him in the living creature, still less can it see him in the objective
world on which it looks out from its prison of separative ego through the
barred windows of the finite mind. It does not see God in the universe; it
knows nothing of the supreme Divinity who is master of these planes full of
various existences and dwells within them; it is blind to the vision by which
all in the world grows divine and the soul itself awakens to its own inherent
divinity and becomes of the Godhead, godlike. What it does see readily, and to
that it attaches itself with passion, is only the life of the ego hunting after
finite things for their own sake and for the satisfaction of the earthly hunger
of the intellect, body, senses. Those who have given themselves up too entirely
to this outward drive of the mentality, fall into the hands of the lower
nature, cling to it and make it their foundation. They become a prey to the nature
of the Rakshasa in man who sacrifices everything to a violent and inordinate
satisfaction of his separate vital ego and makes that the dark godhead of his
will and thought and action and enjoyment. Or they are hurried onward in a fruitless
cycle by the arrogant self-will, self-sufficient thought, self-regarding act,
self-satisfied and yet ever unsatisfied intellectualised appetite of enjoyment
of the Asuric nature. But to live persistently in this separative
ego-consciousness and make that the centre of all our activities is to miss
altogether the true self-awareness. The charm it throws upon the misled instruments
of the spirit is an enchantment that chains life to a profitless circling. All
its hope, action, knowledge are vain things when judged by the divine and
eternal standard, for it shuts out the great hope, excludes the liberating
action, banishes the illuminating knowledge. It is a false knowledge that sees
the phenomenon but misses the truth of the phenomenon, a blind hope that chases
after the transient but misses the eternal, a sterile action whose every profit
is annulled by loss and amounts to a perennial labour of Sisyphus. ¹
The great-souled who open themselves
to the light and largeness of the diviner nature of which man is capable, are alone
on the path narrow in the beginning, inexpressibly wide in the end that leads
to liberation and perfection. The growth of the god in man is man’s proper
business; the steadfast turning of this lower
¹Gita, IX. 11-12.
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Asuric and
Rakshasic into the divine nature is the carefully hidden meaning of human life.
As this growth increases, the veil falls and the soul comes to see the greater significance
of action and the real truth of existence. The eye opens to the Godhead in man,
to the Godhead in the world; it sees inwardly and comes to know outwardly the
infinite Spirit, the Imperishable from whom all existences originate and who exists
in all and by him and in him all exist always. 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. All the word and all the thought become one hymning of the universal
greatness, Light, Beauty, Power and Truth that has revealed itself in its glory
to the human spirit and a worship of the one supreme Soul and infinite Person. All
the long stress of the inner self to break outward becomes a form now of
spiritual endeavour and aspiration to possess the Divine in the soul and
realise the Divine in the nature. All life becomes a constant Yoga and unification
of that Divine and this human spirit. This is the manner of the integral
devotion; it creates a single uplifting of our whole being and nature through
sacrifice by the dedicated heart to the eternal Purushottama.¹
Those
who lay a predominant stress on knowledge, arrive to the same point by an
always increasing, engrossing, enforcing power of the vision of the Divine on
the soul and the nature. Theirs is the sacrifice of knowledge and by an ineffable
ecstasy of knowledge they come to the adoration of the Purushottama, jñāna-yajñena yajanto mām upāsate.
This is comprehension filled with Bhakti, because it is integral in its
instruments, integral in its objective. It is not a pursuit of the Supreme
merely as an abstract unity or an indeterminable Absolute. It is a heart-felt
seeking and seizing of the Supreme and the Universal, a pursuit of the Infinite
in his infinity and of the Infinite in all that is finite, a vision and
embracing of the One in his oneness and of the One in all his several
principles, his innumerable visages, forces,
¹IX. 13-14
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forms,
here, there, everywhere, timelessly and in time, multiply, multitudinously, in
endless aspects of his Godhead, in beings without number, all his million universal
faces fronting us in the world and its creatures, ekatvena prthaktvena bahudhā viśvatomukham. This knowledge
becomes easily an adoration, a large devotion, a vast self-giving, an integral
self-offering because it is the knowledge of a Spirit, the contact of a Being,
the embrace of a supreme and universal Soul which claims all that we are even
as it lavishes on us when we approach it all the treasures of its endless
delight of existence.¹
The
way of works too turns into an adoration and a devotion of self-giving because
it is an entire sacrifice of all our will and its activities to the one
Purushottama. The outward Vedic rite is a powerful symbol, effective for a
slighter though still a heavenward purpose; but the real sacrifice is that
inner oblation in which the Divine All becomes himself the ritual action, the
sacrifice and every single circumstance of the sacrifice. All the working and
forms of that inner rite are the self-ordinance and self-expression of his
power in us mounting by our aspiration towards the source of its energies. The Divine
Inhabitant becomes himself the flame and the offering, because the flame is the
Godward will and that will is God himself within us. And the offering too is
form and force of the constituent Godhead in our nature and being; all that has
been received from him is given up to the service and the worship of its own
Reality, its own supreme Truth and Origin. The Divine Thinker becomes himself
the sacred mantra; it is the Light of his being that expresses itself in the
thought directed Godward and is effective in the revealing word of splendour
that enshrines the thought’s secret and in the rhythm that repeats for man the
rhythms of the Eternal. The illumining Godhead is himself the Veda and that
which is made known by the Veda. He is both the knowledge and the object of the
knowledge. The Rik, the Yajur, the Sama, the word of illumination which lights
up the mind with the rays of knowledge, the word of power for the right
ordaining of action, the word of calm and harmonious attainment for the bringing
of the divine desire of the spirit, are themselves the Brahman, the
¹Footnote:IX. 15.
Page 314.
Godhead.
The mantra of the divine Consciousness brings its light of revelation, the
mantra of the divine Power its will of effectuation, the mantra of the divine
Ananda its equal fulfilment of the spiritual delight of existence. All word and
thought are an outflowering of the great OM, – OM,
the Word, the Eternal. Manifest in the forms of sensible objects, manifest in
that conscious play of creative self-conception of which forms and objects are
the figures, manifest behind in the self-gathered superconscient power of the
Infinite, OM is the sovereign source, seed, womb of thing and idea, form and
name, – it is itself, integrally, the supreme Intangible, the original Unity,
the timeless Mystery self-existent above all manifestation in supernal being.¹ This sacrifice is therefore at
once works and adoration and knowledge.²
To
the soul that thus knows, adores, offers up all its workings in a great
self-surrender of its being to the Eternal, God is all and all is the Godhead.
It knows God as the Father of this world who nourishes and cherishes and
watches over his children. It knows God as the divine Mother who holds us in
her bosom, lavishes upon us the sweetness of her love and fills the universe
with her forms of beauty. It knows him as the first Creator from whom has
originated all that originates and creates in space and time and relation. It
knows him as the Master and ordainer of all universal and of every individual
dispensation. The world and fate and uncertain eventuality cannot terrify, the
aspect of suffering and evil cannot bewilder the man who has surrendered
himself to the Eternal. God to the soul that sees is the path and God is the
goal of his journey, a path in which there is no self-losing and a goal to
which his wisely guided steps are surely arriving at every moment. He knows the
Godhead as the master of his and all being, the upholder of his nature, the husband
of the nature-soul, its lover and cherisher, the inner witness of all his
thoughts and actions. God is his house and country, the refuge of his seekings
and desires, the wise and close and benignant
¹AUM, – A the spirit of the gross and external,
Virat, U the spirit of the subtle and internal, Taijasa, M the spirit of the
secret superconscient omnipotence, Prajna, OM the Absolute, Turiya. – Mandukya Upanishad.
²IX. 16-17.
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friend of
all beings. All birth and status and destruction of apparent existences is to
his vision and experience the One who brings forward, maintains and withdraws
his temporal self-manifestation in its system of perpetual recurrences. He
alone is the imperishable seed and origin of all that seem to be born and
perish and their eternal resting-place in their non-manifestation. It is he
that burns in the heat of the sun and the flame; it is he who is the plenty of
the rain and its withholding; he is all this physical Nature and her workings.
Death is his mask and immortality is his self-revelation. All that we call
existent is he and all that we look upon as non-existent still is there secret
in the Infinite and is part of the mysterious being of the Ineffable.¹
Nothing
but the highest knowledge and adoration, no other way than an entire
self-giving and surrender to this Highest who is all, will bring us to the
Highest. Other religion, other worship, other knowledge, other seeking has
always its fruits, but these are transient and limited to the enjoyment of
divine symbols and appearances. There are always open for our following
according to the balance of our mentality an outer and an inmost knowledge, an
outer and an inmost seeking. Outward religion is the worship of an outward
deity and the pursuit of an external beatitude: its devotees purify their
conduct from sin and attain to an active ethical righteousness in order to
satisfy the fixed law, the Shastra, the external dispensation; they perform the
ceremonial symbol of the outer communion. But their object is to secure after
the mortal pleasure and pain of earthly life the bliss of heavenly worlds, a
greater happiness than earth can give but still a personal and mundane
enjoyment though in a larger world than the field of this limited and suffering
terrestrial nature. And to that to which they aspire, they attain by faith and
right endeavour; for material existence and earthly activities are not the
whole scope of our personal becoming or the whole formula of the cosmos. Other
worlds there are of a larger felicity, svargalokam
viśālam. Thus the Vedic
ritualist of old learned the exoteric sense of the triple Veda, purified
himself from sin, drank the wine of communion with the gods and sought by
sacrifice and good deeds the rewards of heaven. This firm
¹ IX. 17-19
Page 316.
belief in a Beyond and this seeking of a
diviner world secures to the soul in its passing the strength to attain to the
joys of heaven on which its faith and seeking were centred: but the return to
mortal existence imposes itself because the true aim of that existence has not
been found and realised. Here and not elsewhere the highest Godhead has to be
found, the soul’s divine nature developed out of the imperfect physical human
nature and through unity with God and man and universe the whole large truth of
being discovered and lived and made visibly wonderful. That completes the long
cycle of our becoming and admits us to a supreme result; that is the opportunity
given to the soul by the human birth and, until that is accomplished, it cannot
cease. The God-lover advances constantly towards this ultimate necessity of our
birth in cosmos through a concentrated love and adoration by which he makes the
supreme and universal Divine the whole object of his living – not either egoistic
terrestrial satisfaction or the celestial worlds – and the whole object of his thought and his seeing. To see
nothing but the Divine, to be at every moment in union with him, to love him in
all creatures and have the delight of him in all things is the whole condition
of his spiritual existence. His God-vision does not divorce him from life, nor
does he miss anything of the fullness of life; for God himself becomes the
spontaneous bringer to him of every good and of all his inner and outer getting
and having, yogaksemam vahamyaham. The joy of heaven and the
joy of earth are only a small shadow of his possessions; for as he grows into
the Divine, the Divine too flows out upon him with all the light, power and joy
of an infinite existence.¹
Ordinary
religion is a sacrifice to partial godheads other than the integral Divinity.
The Gita takes its direct examples from the old Vedic religion on its exoteric
side as it had then developed; it describes this outward worship as a sacrifice
to other godheads, anya-devatah, to the gods, or to the
divinised Ancestors, or to elemental powers and spirits, devān, pitrn,
bhūtāni. Men consecrate
their life and works ordinarily to partial powers or aspects of the divine
Existence as they see or conceive them – mostly powers and aspects that ensoul
to them
¹IX. 20-22.
Page 317
things
prominent in Nature and man or else reflect to them their own humanity in a
divine exceeding symbol. If they do this with faith, then their faith is
justified; for the Divine accepts whatever symbol, form or conception of
himself is present to the mind of the worshipper, yām yām tanum śraddhayā arcati, as
it is said elsewhere, and meets him according to the faith that is in him. All
sincere religious belief and practice is really a seeking after the one supreme
and universal Godhead; for he always is the sole master of man’s sacrifice and askesis
and infinite enjoyer of his effort and aspiration. However small or low the
form of the worship, however limited the idea of the godhead, however
restricted the giving, the faith, the effort to get behind the veil of one’s
own ego-worship and limitation by material Nature, it yet forms a thread of
connection between the soul of man and the All-soul and there is a response.
Still the response, the fruit of the adoration and offering is according to the
knowledge, the faith and the work and cannot exceed their limitations, and
therefore from the point of view of the greater God-knowledge, which alone
gives the entire truth of being and becoming, this inferior offering is not
given according to the true and highest law of the sacrifice. It is not founded
on a knowledge of the supreme Godhead in his integral existence and the true
principles of his self-manifestation, but attaches itself to external and
partial appearances, – na mām abhijānanti tattvena.
Therefore its sacrifice too is limited in its object, largely egoistic in its
motive, partial and mistaken in its action and its giving, yajanti avidhipūrvakam.
An entire seeing of the Divine is the condition of an entire conscious self-surrender;
the rest attains to things that are incomplete and partial, and has to fall
back from them and return to enlarge itself in a greater seeking and wider
God-experience. But to follow after the supreme and universal Godhead alone and
utterly is to attain to all knowledge and result which other ways acquire,
while yet one is not limited by any aspect, though one finds the truth of him
in all aspects. This movement embraces all forms of divine being on its way to
the supreme Purushottama.¹
This
absolute self-giving, this one-minded
surrender is the
¹ IX 23-25.
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devotion
which the Gita makes the crown of its synthesis. All action and effort are by
this devotion turned into an offering to the supreme and universal Godhead.
“Whatever thou doest, whatever thou enjoyest, whatever thou sacrificest,
whatever thou givest, whatever energy of tapasya, of the soul’s will or effort
thou puttest forth, make it an offering unto Me.” Here the least, the slightest
circumstance of life, the most insignificant gift out of oneself or what one
has, the smallest action assumes a divine significance and it becomes an acceptable
offering to the Godhead who makes it a means for his possession of the soul and
life of the God-lover. The distinctions made by desire and ego then disappear.
As there is no straining after the good result of one’s action, no shunning of
unhappy result, but all action and result are given up to the Supreme to whom
all work and fruit in the world belong for ever, there is no farther bondage.
For by an absolute self-giving all egoistic desire disappears from the heart
and there is a perfect union between the Divine and the individual soul through
an inner renunciation of its separate living. All will, all action, all result
become that of the Godhead, work divinely through the purified and illumined
nature and no longer belong to the limited personal ego. The finite nature thus
surrendered becomes a free channel of the Infinite; the soul in its spiritual
being, uplifted out of the ignorance and the limitation, returns to its oneness
with the Eternal. The Divine Eternal is the inhabitant in all existences; he is
equal in all and the equal friend, father, mother, creator, lover, supporter of
all creatures. He is the enemy of none and he is the partial lover of none;
none has he cast out, none has he eternally condemned, none has he favoured by
any despotism of arbitrary caprice: all at last equally come to him through
their circlings in the ignorance. But it is only this perfect adoration that
can make this indwelling of God in man and man in God a conscious thing and an
engrossing and perfect union. Love of the Highest and a total self-surrender
are the straight and swift way to this divine oneness.¹
The
equal Divine Presence in all of us makes no other preliminary condition, if
once this integral self-giving has been made
¹ IX. 26-29.
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in faith
and in sincerity and with a fundamental completeness. All have access to this
gate, all can enter into this temple: our mundane distinctions disappear in the
mansion of the All-lover. There the virtuous man is not preferred, nor the sinner
shut out from the Presence; together by this road the Brahmin pure of life and
exact in observance of the law and the outcaste born from a womb of sin and
sorrow and rejected of men can travel and find an equal and open access to the supreme
liberation and the highest dwelling in the Eternal. Man and woman find their
equal right before God; for the divine Spirit is no respecter of persons or of
social distinctions and restrictions: all can go straight to him without
intermediary or shackling condition. “If” says the divine Teacher “even a man
of very evil conduct turns to me with a sole and entire love, he must be
regarded as a saint, for the settled will of endeavour in him is a right and
complete will. Swiftly he becomes a soul of righteousness and obtains eternal
peace.” In other words a will of entire self-giving opens wide all the gates of
the spirit and brings in response an entire descent and self-giving of the
Godhead to the human being, and that at once reshapes and assimilates
everything in us to the law of the divine existence by a rapid transformation
of the lower into the spiritual nature. 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. To
the ignorant he brings the light of the divine knowledge, to the feeble the
power of the divine will, to the sinner the liberation of the divine purity, to
the suffering the infinite spiritual joy and Ananda. Their weakness and the
stumblings of their human strength make no difference. “This is my word of
promise,” cries the voice of the Godhead to Arjuna, “that he who loves me shall
not perish.” Previous effort and preparation, the purity and the holiness of
the Brahmin, the enlightened strength of the king-sage great in works and knowledge
have their value, because they make it easier for the imperfect human creature
to arrive at
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this wide
vision and self-surrender; but even without this preparation all who take
refuge in the divine Lover of man, the Vaishya once preoccupied with the
narrowness of wealth-getting and the labour of production, the Shudra hampered
by a thousand hard restrictions, woman shut in and stunted in her growth by the
narrow circle society has drawn around her self-expansion, those too, pāpa-yonayah, on whom their past Karma has imposed even the very
worst of births, the outcaste, the Pariah, the Chandala, find at once the gates
of God opening before them. In the spiritual life all the external distinctions
of which men make so much because they appeal with an oppressive force to the
outward mind, cease before the equality of the divine Light and the wide
omnipotence of an impartial Power.
The
earthly world preoccupied with the dualities and bound to the immediate
transient relations of the hour and the moment is for man, so long as he dwells
here attached to these things and while he accepts the law they impose on him
for the law of his life, a world of struggle, suffering and sorrow. The way to
liberation is to turn from the outward to the inward, from the appearance
created by the material life which lays its burden on the mind and imprisons it
in the grooves of the life and the body to the divine Reality which waits to
manifest itself through the freedom of the spirit. Love of the world, the mask,
must change into the love of God, the Truth. Once this secret and inner Godhead
is known and is embraced, the whole being and the whole life will undergo a
sovereign uplifting and a marvellous transmutation. In place of the ignorance
of the lower Nature absorbed in its outward works and appearances the eye will
open to the vision of God everywhere, to the unity and universality of the
spirit. The world’s sorrow and pain will disappear in the bliss of the
All-blissful; our weakness and error and sin will be changed into the
all-embracing and all-transforming strength, truth and purity of the Eternal.
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
IX. 30-32.
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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, an intertwining
of all their threads, a high fusion, a wide identifying movement.¹
¹IX. 33-34.
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