part one
The synthesis of
works, love
and knowledge
ONE
The Two Natures*
THE
first six chapters of the Gita have been treated as a single block of
teachings, its primary basis of practice and knowledge; the remaining twelve
may be similarly treated as two closely connected blocks which develop the rest
of the doctrine from this primary basis. The seventh to the twelfth chapters
lay down a large metaphysical statement of the nature of the Divine Being and
on that foundation closely relate and synthetise knowledge and devotion, just
as the first part of the Gita related and synthetised works and knowledge. The
vision of the World-Purusha intervenes in the eleventh chapter, gives a dynamic
turn to this stage of the synthesis and relates it vividly to works and life.
Thus again all is brought powerfully back to the original question of Arjuna
round which the whole exposition revolves and completes its cycle. Afterwards
the Gita proceeds by the differentiation of the Purusha and Prakriti to work
out its ideas of the action of the gunas, of the ascension beyond the gunas and
of the culmination of desireless works with knowledge where that coalesces with
Bhakti, – knowledge, works and love made one, – and it rises thence to its
great finale, the supreme secret of self-surrender to the Master of Existence.
In this second
part of the Gita we come to a more concise and easy manner of statement than we
have yet had. In the first six chapters the definitions have not yet been made
which give the key to the underlying truth; difficulties are being met and
solved; the progress is a little laboured and moves through several involutions
and returns; much is implied the bearing of which is not yet clear. Here we
seem to get on to clearer ground and to lay hold of a more compact and pointed
expression. But because of this very conciseness we have to be careful always
of our steps in order to avoid error and a missing of the real sense.
*Gita, VII. 1-14.
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For we are here no longer
steadily on the safe ground of psychological and spiritual experience, but have
to deal with intellectual statements of spiritual and often of supracosmic truth.
Metaphysical statement has always this peril and uncertainty about it that it
is an attempt to define to our minds what is really infinite, an attempt which
has to be made, but can never be quite satisfactory, quite final or ultimate.
The highest spiritual truth can be lived, can be seen, but can only be
partially stated. The deeper method and language of the Upanishads with its
free resort to image and symbol, its intuitive form of speech in which the hard
limiting definiteness of intellectual utterance is broken down and the
implications of words are allowed to roll out into an illimitable wave of
suggestion, is in these realms the only right method and language. But the Gita
cannot resort to this form, because it is designed to satisfy an intellectual
difficulty, answers a state of mind in which the reason, the arbiter to which
we refer the conflicts of our impulses and sentiments, is at war with itself
and impotent to arrive at a conclusion. The reason has to be led to a truth
beyond itself, but by its own means and in its own manner. Offered a
spiritually psychological solution, of the data of which it has no experience,
it can only be assured of its validity if it is satisfied by an intellectual
statement of the truths of being upon which the solution rests.
So far the
justifying truths that have been offered to it are those with which it is
already familiar, and they are only sufficient as a starting-point. There is
first the distinction between the Self and the individual being in Nature. The
distinction has been used to point out that this individual being in Nature is
necessarily subject, so long as he lives shut up within the action of the ego,
to the workings of the three gunas which make up by their unstable movements
the whole scope and method of the reason, the mind and the life and senses in
the body. And within this circle there is no solution. Therefore the solution
has to be found by an ascent out of the circle, above this nature of the gunas,
to the one immutable Self and silent Spirit, because then one gets beyond that
action of the ego and desire which is the whole root of the difficulty. But since
this by itself seems to lead straight towards inaction, as beyond Nature there
is no
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instrumentality of action and no
cause or determinant of action, – for the immutable self is inactive, impartial
and equal to all things, all workings and all happenings, – the Yoga idea is
brought in of the Ishwara, the Divine as master of works and sacrifice, and it
is hinted but not yet expressly stated that this Divine exceeds even the
immutable self and that in him lies the key to cosmic existence. Therefore by
rising to him through the Self it is possible to have spiritual freedom from
our works and yet to continue in the works of Nature. But it has not yet been
stated who is this Supreme, incarnate here in the divine teacher and charioteer
of works, or what are his relations to the Self and to the individual being in
Nature. Nor is it clear how the Will to works coming from him can be other than
the will in the nature of the three gunas. And if it is only that, then the
soul obeying it can hardly fail to be in subjection to the gunas in its action,
if not in its spirit, and if so, at once the freedom promised becomes either
illusory or incomplete. Will seems to be an aspect of the executive part of
being, to be power and active force of nature, Shakti, Prakriti. Is there then
a higher Nature than that of the three gunas? Is there a power of pragmatic
creation, will, action other than that of ego, desire, mind, sense, reason and
the vital impulse?
Therefore, in
this uncertainty, what has now to be done is to give more completely the
knowledge on which divine works are to be founded. And this can only be the
complete, the integral knowledge of the Divine who is the source of works and
in whose being the worker becomes by knowledge free; for he knows the free
Spirit from whom all works proceed and participates in his freedom. Moreover
this knowledge must bring a light that justifies the assertion with which the
first part of the Gita closes. It must ground the supremacy of bhakti over all
other motives and powers of spiritual consciousness and action; it must be a
knowledge of the supreme Lord of all creatures to whom alone the soul can offer
itself in the perfect self-surrender which is the highest height of all love
and devotion. This is what the Teacher proposes to give in the opening verses
of the seventh chapter which initiate the development that occupies all the
rest of the book. “Hear,” he says, “how by practising Yoga with a
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mind attached to me and with me
as āśraya (the whole basis,
lodgment, point of resort of the conscious being and action) thou shalt know me
without any remainder of doubt, integrally, samagram
mām. I will speak to thee without omission or remainder, aśesatah,” (for
otherwise a ground of doubt may remain), “the essential knowledge, attended
with all the comprehensive knowledge, by knowing which there shall be no other
thing here left to be known.” The implication of the phrase is that the Divine
Being is all, vāsudevah
sarvam, and therefore if he is known integrally in all his powers and
principles, then all is known, not only the pure Self, but the world and action
and Nature. There is then nothing else here left to be known, because all is
that Divine Existence. It is only because our view here is not thus integral,
because it rests on the dividing mind and reason and the separative idea of the
ego, that our mental perception of things is an ignorance. We have to get away
from this mental and egoistic view to the true unifying knowledge, and that has
two aspects, the essential, jñāna,
and the comprehensive, vijñāna,
the direct spiritual awareness of the supreme Being and the right intimate
knowledge of the principles of his existence, Prakriti, Purusha and the rest,
by which all that is can be known in its divine origin and in the supreme truth
of its nature. That integral knowledge, says the Gita, is a rare and difficult
thing; “among thousands of men one here and there strives after perfection, and
of those who strive and attain to perfection one here and there knows me in all
the principles of my existence, tattvatah.”
Then, to start
with and in order to found this integral knowledge, the Gita makes that deep
and momentous distinction which is the practical basis of all its Yoga, the
distinction between the two Natures, the phenomenal and the spiritual Nature. “The
five elements (conditions of material being), mind, reason, ego, this is my
eightfold divided Nature. But know my other Nature different from this, the
supreme which becomes the Jiva and by which this world is upheld.” Here is the
first new metaphysical idea of the Gita which helps it to start from the
notions of the Sankhya philosophy and yet exceed them and give to their terms,
which it keeps and extends, a Vedantic significance. An eightfold
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Nature constituted of the five
Bhutas, – elements, as it is rendered, but rather elemental or essential
conditions of material being to which are given the concrete names of earth,
water, fire, air and ether, – the mind with its various senses and organs, the
reason-will and the ego, is the Sankhya description of Prakriti. The Sankhya
stops there, and because it stops there, it has to set up an unbridgeable
division between the soul and Nature; it has to posit them as two quite
distinct primary entities. The Gita also, if it stopped there, would have to make
the same incurable antinomy between the Self and cosmic Nature which would then
be only the Maya of the three gunas and all this cosmic existence would be
simply the result of this Maya; it could be nothing else. But there is
something else, there is a higher principle, a nature of spirit, parā prakrtir me. There is
a supreme nature of the Divine which is the real source of cosmic existence and
its fundamental creative force and effective energy and of which the other
lower and ignorant Nature is only a derivation and a dark shadow. In this highest
dynamis Purusha and Prakriti are one. Prakriti there is only the will and the
executive power of the Purusha, his activity of being, – not a separate entity,
but himself in Power.
This supreme Prakriti is not merely a presence
of the power of spiritual being immanent in cosmic activities. For then it might
be only the inactive presence of the all-pervading Self, immanent in all things
or containing them, compelling in a way the world action but not itself active.
Nor is this highest Prakriti the avyakta
of the Sankhyas, the primary unmanifest seed-state of the manifest active
eightfold nature of things, the one productive original force of Prakriti out
of which her many instrumental and executive powers evolve. Nor is it
sufficient to interpret that idea of avyakta
in the Vedantic sense and say that this supreme Nature is the power involved
and inherent in unmanifest Spirit or Self out of which cosmos comes and into
which it returns. It is that, but it is much more; for that is only one of its
spiritual states. It is the integral conscious-power of the supreme Being, cit-śakti, which is behind the self
and cosmos. In the immutable Self it is involved in the Spirit; it is there,
but in nivrtti or a holding
back from action: in the mutable self and the cosmos
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it comes out into action, pravrtti. There by its dynamic presence
it evolves in the Spirit all existences and appears in them as their essential
spiritual nature, the persistent truth behind their play of subjective and
objective phenomena. It is the essential quality and force, svabhāva, the self-principle of all
their becoming, the inherent principle and divine power behind their phenomenal
existence. The balance of the gunas is only a quantitative and quite derivative
play evolved out of this supreme Principle. All this activity of forms, all
this mental, sensuous, intelligential striving of the lower nature is only a
phenomenon, which could not be at all except for this spiritual force and this
power of being; it comes from that and it exists in that and by that solely. If
we dwell in the phenomenal nature only and see things only by the notions it
impresses on us, we shall not get at the real truth of our active existence. The
real truth is this spiritual power, this divine force of being, this essential
quality of the spirit in things or rather of the spirit in which things are and
from which they draw all their potencies and the seeds of their movements. Get
at that truth, power, quality and we shall get at the real law of our becoming
and the divine principle of our living, its source and sanction in the
Knowledge and not only its process in the Ignorance.
This is to throw
the sense of the Gita into language suited to our modern way of thinking; but
if we look at its description of the Para Prakriti, we shall find that this is
practically the substance of what it says. For first, this other higher Prakriti
is, says Krishna, my supreme nature, prakrtim me parām. And this
“I” here is the Purushottama, the supreme Being, the supreme Soul, the
transcendent and universal Spirit. The original and eternal nature of the
Spirit and its transcendent and originating Shakti is what is meant by the Para
Prakriti. For speaking first of the origin of the world from the point of view
of the active power of his Nature, Krishna assevers,
“This is the womb of all beings,”
etad-yonīni bhūtāni. And in the next line of the couplet,
again stating the same fact from the point of view of the originating Soul, he
continues, “I am the birth of the whole world and so too its dissolution; there
is nothing else supreme beyond Me.” Here then the supreme Soul, Purushottama,
and the
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supreme Nature, Para Prakriti,
are identified: they are put as two ways of looking at one and the same
reality. For when Krishna declares, I am the birth of
the world and its dissolution, it is evident that it is this Para Prakriti,
supreme Nature, of his being which is both these things. The Spirit is the
supreme Being in his infinite consciousness and the supreme Nature is the infinity
of power or will of being of the Spirit, – it is his infinite consciousness in
its inherent divine energy and its supernal divine action. The birth is the
movement of evolution of this conscious Energy out of the Spirit, parā prakrtir jīvabhūtā, its activity in the
mutable universe; the dissolution is the withdrawing of that activity by
involution of the Energy into the immutable existence and self-gathered power
of the Spirit. That then is what is initially meant by the supreme Nature.
The supreme
Nature, parā prakrtih,
is then the infinite timeless conscious power of the self-existent Being out of
which all existences in the cosmos are manifested and come out of timelessness
into Time. But in order to provide a spiritual basis for this manifold
universal becoming in the cosmos the supreme Nature formulates itself as the
Jiva. To put it otherwise, the eternal multiple soul of the Purushottama
appears as individual spiritual existence in all the forms of the cosmos. All
existences are instinct with the life of the one indivisible Spirit; all are
supported in their personality, actions and forms by the eternal multiplicity
of the one Purusha. We must be careful not to make the mistake of thinking that
this supreme Nature is identical with the Jiva manifested in Time in the sense
that there is nothing else or that it is only nature of becoming and not at all
nature of being: that could not be the supreme nature of the Spirit. Even in
Time it is something more; for otherwise the only truth of it in the cosmos
would be nature of multiplicity and there would be no nature of unity in the
world. That is not what the Gita says: it does not say that the supreme
Prakriti is in its essence the Jiva, jīvātmikām,
but that it has become the Jiva, jīvabhūtām;
and it is implied in that expression that behind its manifestation as the Jiva
here it is originally something else and higher, it is nature of the one
supreme spirit. The Jiva, as we are told later on, is the Lord, īśvara, but in his partial
manifestation, mamaivāmśah;
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even all the multiplicity of
beings in the universe or in numberless universes could not be in their
becoming the integral Divine, but only a partial manifestation of the infinite
One. In them Brahman the one indivisible existence resides as if divided, avibhaktam ca bhūtesu vibhaktam
iva ca sthitam. The unity is the greater truth, the multiplicity is the
lesser truth, though both are a truth and neither of them is an illusion.
It is by the
unity of this spiritual nature that the world is sustained, yayedam dhāryate jagat, even as it
is that from which it is born with all its becomings, etad-yonīni bhūtāni sarvāni, and that
also which withdraws the whole world and its existences into itself in the hour
of dissolution, aham krtsnasya
jagatah prabhavah
pralayas tathā. But in the manifestation which is thus put forth in
the Spirit, upheld in its action, withdrawn in its periodical rest from action,
the Jiva is the basis of the multiple existence; it is the multiple soul, if we
may so call it, or, if we prefer, the soul of the multiplicity we experience
here. It is one always with the Divine in its being, different from it only in
the power of its being, – different not in the sense that it is not at all the
same power, but in this sense that it only supports the one power in a partial
multiply individualised action. Therefore all things are initially, ultimately
and in the principle of their continuance too the Spirit. The fundamental
nature of all is nature of the Spirit, and only in their lower differential
phenomena do they seem to be something else, to be nature of body, life, mind,
reason, ego and the senses. But these are phenomenal derivatives, they are not
the essential truth of our nature and our existence.
The supreme
nature of spiritual being gives us then both an original truth and power of
existence beyond cosmos and a first basis of spiritual truth for the
manifestation in the cosmos. But where is the link between this supreme nature
and the lower phenomenal nature? On me, says Krishna,
all this, all that is here sarvam idam,
– the common phrase in the Upanishads for the totality of phenomena in the
mobility of the universe – is strung like pearls upon a thread. But this is
only an image which we cannot press very far; for the pearls are only kept in
relation to each other by the thread and have no other oneness or relation with
the pearl-string except their dependence on it for this mutual
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connection. Let us go then from
the image to that which it images. It is the supreme nature of Spirit, the
infinite conscious power of its being, self-conscient, all-conscient, all-wise,
which maintains these phenomenal existences in relation to each other,
penetrates them, abides in and supports them and weaves them into the system of
its manifestation. This one supreme power manifests not only in all as the One,
but in each as the Jiva, the individual spiritual presence; it manifests also
as the essence of all quality of Nature. These are therefore the concealed
spiritual powers behind all phenomena. This highest quality is not the working
of the three Gunas, which is phenomenon of quality and not its spiritual
essence. It is rather the inherent, one, yet variable inner power of all these
superficial variations. It is a fundamental truth of the Becoming, a truth that
supports and gives a spiritual and divine significance to all its appearances.
The workings of the Gunas are only the superficial unstable becomings of
reason, mind, sense, ego, life and matter, sāttvikā
bhāvā rājasāstāmasāśca; but this is
rather the essential stable original intimate power of the becoming, svabhāva. It is that which
determines the primary law of all becoming and of each Jiva; it constitutes the
essence and develops the movement of the nature. It is a principle in each
creature that derives from and is immediately related to a transcendent divine
Becoming, that of the Ishwara, madbhāvah.
In this relation of the divine bhāva
to the svabhāva and of the svabhāva to the superficial bhāvāh, of the divine
Nature to the individual self-nature and of the self-nature in its pure and
original quality to the phenomenal nature in all its mixed and confused play of
qualities, we find the link between that supreme and this lower existence. The
degraded powers and values of the inferior Prakriti derive from the absolute
powers and values of the supreme Shakti and must go back to them to find their
own source and truth and the essential law of their operation and movement. So
too the soul or Jiva involved here in the shackled, poor and inferior play of
the phenomenal qualities, if he would escape from it and be divine and perfect,
must by resort to the pure action of his essential quality of Swabhava go back
to that higher law of his own being in which he can discover the will, the
power, the
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dynamic principle, the highest working
of his divine nature.
This is clear
from the immediately subsequent passage in which the Gita gives a number of
instances to show how the Divine in the power of his supreme nature manifests
and acts within the animate and so-called inanimate existences of the universe.
We may disentangle them from the loose and free order which the exigence of the
poetical form imposes and put them in their proper philosophical series. First,
the divine Power and Presence works within the five elemental conditions of matter.
“I am taste in the waters, sound in ether, scent in earth, energy of light in
fire,” and, it may be added for more completeness, touch or contact in air.
That is to say, the Divine himself in his Para Prakriti is the energy at the
basis of the various sensory relations of which, according to the ancient
Sankhya system, the ethereal, the radiant, electric and gaseous, the liquid and
the other elemental conditions of matter are the physical medium. The five
elemental conditions of matter are the quantitative or material element in the
lower nature and are the basis of material forms. The five Tanmatras – taste, touch,
scent, and the others – are the qualitative element. These Tanmatras are the
subtle energies whose action puts the sensory consciousness in relation to the
gross forms of matter, – they are the basis of all phenomenal knowledge. From
the material point of view matter is the reality and the sensory relations are
derivative; but from the spiritual point of view the truth is the opposite. Matter
and the material media are themselves derivative powers and at bottom are only
concrete ways or conditions in which the workings of the quality of Nature in
things manifest themselves to the sensory consciousness of the Jiva. The one
original and eternal fact is the energy of
Nature, the power and quality of being which so manifests itself to the soul
through the senses. And what is essential in the senses, most spiritual, most
subtle is itself stuff of that eternal quality and power. But energy or power
of being in Nature is the Divine himself in his Prakriti; each sense in its
purity is therefore that Prakriti, each sense is the Divine in his dynamic
conscious force.
This we gather
better from the other terms of the series. “I am the light of sun and moon, the
manhood in man, the intelligence
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of the intelligent, the energy of
the energetic, the strength of the strong, the ascetic force of those who do askesis,
tapasyā.” “I am life in all
existences.” In each case it is the energy of the essential quality on which
each of these becomings depends for what it has become, that is given as the
characteristic sign indicating the presence of the divine Power in their
nature. Again, “I am Pranava in all the Vedas,” that is to say, the basic syllable
OM, which is the foundation of all the potent creative sounds of the revealed
word; OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech,
that which contains and sums up, synthetises and releases all the spiritual
power and all the potentiality of Vak and Shabda and of which the other sounds,
out of whose stuff words of speech are woven, are supposed to be the developed evolutions.
That makes it quite clear. It is not the phenomenal developments of the senses
or of life or of light, intelligence, energy, strength, manhood, ascetic force
that are proper to the supreme Prakriti. It is the essential quality in its
spiritual power that constitutes the Swabhava. It is the force of spirit so
manifesting, it is the light of its consciousness and the power of its energy
in things revealed in a pure original sign that is the self-nature. That force,
light, power is the eternal seed from which all other things are the
developments and derivations and variabilities and plastic circumstances.
Therefore the Gita throws in as the most general statement in the series, “Know
me to be the eternal seed of all existences, O son of Pritha.” This eternal
seed is the power of spiritual being, the conscious will in the being, the seed
which, as is said elsewhere, the Divine casts into the great Brahman, into the
supramental vastness, and from that all are born into phenomenal existence. It
is that seed of spirit which manifests itself as the essential quality in all
becomings and constitutes their Swabhava.
The practical distinction between
this original power of essential quality and the phenomenal derivations of the
lower nature, between the thing itself in its purity and the thing in its lower
appearances, is indicated very clearly at the close of the series. “I am the
strength of the strong devoid of desire and liking,” stripped of all attachment
to the phenomenal pleasure of things. “I am in beings the desire which is not
contrary to their
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Dharma.” And as for the secondary
subjective becomings of Nature, bhāvāh
(states of mind, affections of desire, movements of passion, the reactions of
the senses, the limited and dual play of reason, the turns of the feeling and
moral sense), which are sattwic, rajasic and tamasic, as for the working of the
three gunas, they are, says the Gita, not themselves the pure action of the
supreme spiritual nature, but are derivations from it; “they are verily from
me,” matta eva, they have no other origin, “but I am not in them, it is they
that are in me.” Here is indeed a strong and yet subtle distinction. “I am”
says the Divine “the essential light, strength, desire, power, intelligence,
but these derivations from them I am not in my essence, nor am I in them, yet
are they all of them from me and they are all in my being.” It is then upon the
basis of these statements that we have to view the transition of things from
the higher to the lower and again from the lower back to the higher nature.
The first statement offers no
difficulty. The strong man in spite of the divine nature of the principle of
strength in him falls into subjection to desire and to attachment, stumbles
into sin, struggles towards virtue. But that is because he descends in all his
derivative action into the grasp of the three Gunas and does not govern that
action from above, from his essential divine nature. The divine nature of his
strength is not affected by these derivations, it remains the same in its
essence in spite of every obscuration and every lapse. The Divine is there in
that nature and supports him by its strength through the confusions of his
lower existence till he is able to recover the light, illumine wholly his life
with the true sun of his being and govern his will and its acts by the pure
power of the divine will in his higher nature. But how can the Divine be
desire, kāma?
for this desire, this kāma
has been declared to be our one great enemy who has to be slain. But that
desire was the desire of the lower nature of the Gunas which has its native
point of origin in the rajasic being, rajogunasamudbhavah;
for this is what we usually mean when we speak of desire. This other, the
spiritual, is a will not contrary to the Dharma.
Is it meant that
the spiritual kāma
is a virtuous desire, ethical in its nature, a sattwic desire, – for virtue is
always sattwic in
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its origin and motive force? But
then there would be here an obvious contradiction, – since in the very next
line all sattwic affections are declared to be not the Divine, but only lower
derivations. Undoubtedly sin has to be abandoned if one is to get anywhere near
the Godhead; but so too has virtue to be overpassed if we are to enter into the
Divine Being. The sattwic nature has to be attained, but it has then to be
exceeded. Ethical action is only a means of purification by which we can rise
towards the divine nature, but that nature itself is lifted beyond the
dualities, – and indeed there could otherwise be no pure divine presence or
divine strength in the strong man who is subjected to the rajasic passions. Dharma
in the spiritual sense is not morality or ethics. Dharma, says the Gita
elsewhere, is action governed by the Swabhava, the essential law of one's
nature. And this Swabhava is at its core the pure quality of the spirit in its
inherent power of conscious will and in its characteristic force of action. The
desire meant here is therefore the purposeful will of the Divine in us
searching for and discovering not the pleasure of the lower Prakriti, but the
Ananda of its own play and self-fulfilling; it is the desire of the divine
Delight of existence unrolling its own conscious force of action in accordance
with the law of the Swabhava.
But what again
is meant by saying that the Divine is not in the becomings, the forms and
affections of the lower nature, even the sattwic, though they all are in his
being? In a sense he must evidently be in them, otherwise they could not exist.
But what is meant is that the true and supreme spiritual nature of the Divine
is not imprisoned there; they are only phenomena in his being created out of it
by the action of the ego and the ignorance. The ignorance presents everything
to us in an inverted vision and at least a partially falsified experience. We
imagine that the soul is in the body, almost a result and derivation from the
body; even we so feel it: but it is the body that is in the soul and a result
and derivation from the soul. We think of the spirit as a small part of us –
the Purusha who is no bigger than the thumb – in this great mass of material
and mental phenomena: in reality, the latter for all its imposing appearance is
a very small thing in the infinity of
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the being of the spirit. So it is
here; in much the same sense these things are in the Divine rather than the
Divine in these things. This lower nature of the three gunas which creates so
false a view of things and imparts to them an inferior character is a 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. “By these three kinds of becoming
which are of the nature of the Gunas, this whole world is bewildered and does
not recognise Me supreme beyond them and imperishable.” If we could see that
that Divine is the real truth of our existence, all else also would change to
our vision, assume its true character and our life and action acquire the
divine values and move in the law of the divine nature.
But why then,
since the Divine is there after all and the divine nature at the root even of
these bewildering derivations, since we are the Jiva and the Jiva is that, is
this Maya so hard to overcome, māyā
duratyayā? Because it is still the Maya of the Divine, daivī hyesā gunamayī
mama māyā; “this is my divine Maya of the gunas.” It is itself
divine and a development from the nature of the Divine, but the Divine in the
nature of the gods; it is daivī,
of the godheads or, if you will, of the Godhead, but of the Godhead in its
divided subjective and lower cosmic aspects, sattwic, rajasic and tamasic. It
is a cosmic veil which the Godhead has spun around our understanding; Brahma,
Vishnu and Rudra have woven its complex threads; the Shakti, the Supreme Nature
is there at its base and is hidden in its every tissue. We have to work out
this web in ourselves and turn through it and from it leaving it behind us when
its use is finished, turn from the gods to the original and supreme Godhead in
whom we shall discover at the same time the last sense of the gods and their
works and the inmost spiritual verities of our own imperishable existence. “To
Me who turn and come, they alone cross over beyond this Maya.”
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