PART II
THE SUPREME SECRET
THIRTEEN
The Field and its Knower*
THE Gita in its last six chapters, in order to found on a
clear and complete knowledge the way of the soul's rising out of the lower into
the divine nature, restates in another form the enlightenment the Teacher has
already imparted to Arjuna. Essentially it is the same knowledge, but details
and relations are now made prominent and assigned their entire significance, thoughts
and truths brought out in their full value that were alluded to only in passing
or generally stated in the light of another purpose. Thus in the first six
chapters the knowledge necessary for the distinction between the immutable self
and the soul veiled in nature was accorded an entire prominence. The references
to the supreme Self and Purusha were summary and not at all explicit; it was
assumed in order to justify works in the world and it was affirmed to be the
Master of being, but there was otherwise nothing to show what it was and its
relations to the rest were not even hinted at, much less developed. The
remaining chapters are devoted to the bringing out of this suppressed knowledge
in a conspicuous light and strong pre-eminence. It is to the Lord, the Ishwara,
it is to the distinction of the higher and the lower nature and to the vision of
the all-originating and all-constituting Godhead in Nature, it is to the One in
all beings that prominence has been assigned in the next six Adhyayas (7-12) in
order to found a root-unity of works and love with knowledge. But now it is
necessary to bring out more definitely the precise relations between the
supreme Purusha, the immutable self, the Jiva and Prakriti in her action and
her Gunas. Arjuna is therefore made to put a question which shall evoke a
clearer elucidation of these still ill-lighted matters. He asks to learn of the
Purusha and the Prakriti; he inquires of the field of being and the knower of
the field and of knowledge and the object of knowledge. Here
*Gita, XIII.
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is contained the sum of all the knowledge of
self and the world that is still needed if the soul is to throw off its natural
ignorance and staying its steps on a right use of knowledge, of life, of works
and of its own relations with the Divine in these things ascend into unity of
being with the eternal Spirit of existence.
The essence of the Gita's ideas in these
matters has already, anticipating the final evolution of its thought, been elucidated
in a certain measure; but, following its example, we may state them again from
the point of view of its present preoccupation. Action being admitted, a divine
action done with self-knowledge as the instrument of the divine Will in the cosmos
being accepted as perfectly consistent with the Brahmic status and an indispensable
part of the Godward movement, that action being uplifted inwardly as a
sacrifice with adoration to the Highest, how does this way practically affect
the great object of spiritual life, the rising from the lower into the higher
nature, from mortal into immortal being? All life, all works are a transaction
between the soul and Nature. What is the original character of that
transaction? what does it become at its spiritual culminating point? to what
perfection does it lead the soul that gets free from its lower and external motives
and grows inwardly into the very highest poise of the Spirit and deepest
motive-force of the works of its energy in the universe? These are the
questions involved, – there are others which the Gita does not raise or answer,
for they were not pressingly present to the human mind of that day, – and they
are replied to in the sense of the solution drawn from a large-sighted
combination of the Vedantic, Sankhya and Yoga views of existence which is the
starting-point of the whole thought of the Gita.
The Soul which finds itself here embodied in
Nature has a triple reality to its own self-experience. First it is a spiritual
being apparently subjected by ignorance to the outward workings of Prakriti and
represented in her mobility as an acting, thinking, mutable personality, a
creature of Nature, an ego. Next when it gets behind all this action and
motion, it finds its own higher reality to be an eternal and impersonal self
and immutable spirit which has no other share in the action and movement than to
support it by its presence and regard it as an undisturbed equal witness. And
last, when it looks beyond these two opposite selves,
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it discovers a greater ineffable Reality from
which both proceed, the Eternal who is Self of the self and the Master of all
Nature and all action, and not only the Master, but the origin and the
spiritual support and scene of these workings of his own energy in Cosmos, and
not only the origin and spiritual container, but the spiritual inhabitant in
all forces, in all things and in all beings, and not only the inhabitant but,
by the developments of this eternal energy of his being which we call Nature,
himself all energies and forces, all things and all beings. This Nature itself
is of two kinds, one derived and inferior, another original and supreme. There
is a lower nature of the cosmic mechanism by association with which the soul in
Prakriti lives in a certain ignorance born of Maya, traigunyamayī māyā, conceives of itself as
an ego of embodied mind and life, works under the power of the modes of Nature,
thinks itself bound, suffering, limited by personality, chained to the obligation
of birth and the wheel of action, a thing of desires, transient, mortal, a
slave of its own nature. Above this inferior power of existence there is a
higher divine and spiritual nature of its own true being in which this soul is
for ever a conscious portion of the Eternal and Divine, blissful, free,
superior to its mask of becoming, immortal, imperishable, a power of the Godhead.
To rise by this higher nature to the Eternal through divine knowledge, love and
works founded on a spiritual universality is the key of the complete spiritual
liberation. This much has been made clear; and we have to see now more in detail
what farther considerations this change of being involves and especially what
is the difference between these two natures and how our action and our
soul-status are affected by the liberation. For that purpose the Gita enters
largely into certain details of the highest knowledge which it had hitherto
kept in the background. Especially it dwells on the relation between Being and
becoming, Soul and Nature, the action of the three Gunas, the highest
liberation, the largest fullest self-giving of the human soul to the Divine
Spirit. There is in all that it says in these closing six chapters much of the
greatest importance, but it is the last thought with which it closes that is of
supreme interest; for in it we shall find the central idea of its teaching, its
great word to the soul of man, its highest message.
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First, the whole
of existence must be regarded as a field of the soul's construction and action
in the midst of Nature. The Gita explains the ksetram, field, by saying that it is this body which is
called the field of the spirit, and in this body there is someone who takes
cognizance of the field, ksetrajña,
the knower of Nature. It is evident, however, from the definitions that succeed
that it is not the physical body alone which is the field, but all too that the
body supports, the working of nature, the mentality, the natural action of the
objectivity and subjectivity of our being.¹
This wider body too is only the individual field; there is a larger, a
universal, a world-body, a world-field of the same Knower. For in each embodied
creature there is this one Knower: in each existence he uses mainly and
centrally this single outward result of the power of his nature which he has
formed for his habitation īśā
vāsyam sarvam yat kiñca, makes each separate sustained
knot of his mobile Energy the first base and scope of his developing harmonies.
In Nature he knows the world as it affects and is reflected by the
consciousness in this one limited body; the world exists to us as it is seen in
our single mind, – and in the end, even, this seemingly small embodied
consciousness can so enlarge itself that it contains in itself the whole
universe, ātani viśa-darśnam. But, physically, it is a microcosm in a macrocosm, and
the macrocosm too, the large world too, is a body and field inhabited by the
spiritual knower.
That becomes
evident when the Gita proceeds to state the character, nature, source,
deformations, powers of this sensible embodiment of our being. We see then that
it is the whole working of the lower Prakriti that is meant by the ksetra. That totality is the
field of action of the embodied spirit here within us, the field of which it
takes cognizance. For a varied and detailed knowledge of all this world of
Nature in its essential action as seen from the spiritual view-point we are referred
to the verses of the ancient seers, the seers of the Veda and Upanishads, in
which we get the inspired and intuitive account of these creations of the
Spirit, and to the Brahma Sutras which will give us the
¹ The Upanishad speaks of a fivefold
body or sheath of Nature, a physical, vital, mental, ideal and divine body;
this may be regarded as the totality of the field, ksetram.
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rational and philosophic
analysis. The Gita contents itself with a brief practical statement of the
lower nature of our being in the terms of the Sankhya thinkers. First there is
the indiscriminate unmanifest Energy; out of that has come the objective
evolution of the five elemental states of matter; as also the subjective
evolution of the senses, intelligence and ego; there are too five objects of
the senses, or rather five different ways of sense cognizance of the world,
powers evolved by the universal energy in order to deal with all the forms of
things she has created from the five elemental states assumed by her original
objective substance, – organic relations
by which the ego endowed with intelligence and sense acts on the formations of
the cosmos: this is the constitution of the Kshetra. Then there is a general
consciousness that first informs and then illumines the Energy in its works;
there is a faculty of that consciousness by which the Energy holds together the
relations of objects; there is too a continuity, a persistence of the
subjective and objective relations of our consciousness with its objects. These
are the necessary powers of the field; all these are common and universal
powers at once of the mental, vital and physical Nature. Pleasure and pain,
liking and disliking are the principal deformations of the Kshetra. From the Vedantic
point of view we may say that pleasure and pain are the vital or sensational
deformations given by the lower energy to the spontaneous Ananda or delight of
the spirit when brought into contact with her workings. And we may say from the
same view-point that liking and disliking are the corresponding mental
deformations given by her to the reactive Will of the spirit that determines
its response to her contacts. These dualities are the positive and negative
terms in which the ego soul of the lower nature enjoys the universe. The
negative terms, pain, dislike, sorrow, repulsion and the rest, are perverse or
at the best ignorantly reverse responses: the positive terms, liking, pleasure,
joy, attraction, are ill-guided responses or at the best insufficient and in
character inferior to those of the true spiritual experience.
All these things taken together constitute the
fundamental character of our first transactions with the world of Nature, but
it is evidently not the whole description of our being; it is our
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actuality but not the limit of
our possibilities. There is something beyond to be known, jñeyam, and it is when the knower of the field turns from the field
itself to learn of himself within it and of all that is behind its appearances
that real knowledge begins, jñānam,—
the true knowledge of the field no less than of the knower. That turning inward
alone delivers from ignorance. For the farther we go inward, the more we seize
on greater and fuller realities of things and grasp the complete truth both of
God and the soul and of the world and its movements. Therefore, says the divine
Teacher, it is the knowledge at once of the field and its knower, ksetra-ksetrajñayor jñānam,
a united and even unified self-knowledge and world-knowledge, which is the real
illumination and the only wisdom. For both soul and nature are the Brahman, but
the true truth of the world of Nature can only be discovered by the liberated
sage who possesses also the truth of the spirit. One Brahman, one reality in
Self and Nature is the object of all knowledge.
The
Gita then tells us what is the spiritual knowledge or rather it tells us what
are the conditions of knowledge, the marks, the signs of the man whose soul is
turned towards the inner wisdom. These signs are the recognised and traditional
characteristics of the sage, – his strong turning away of the heart from
attachment to outward and worldly things, his inward and brooding spirit, his
steady mind and calm equality, the settled fixity of his thought and will upon
the greatest inmost truths, upon the things that are real and eternal. First,
there comes a certain moral condition, a sattwic government of the natural
being. There is fixed in him a total absence of worldly pride and arrogance, a
candid soul, a tolerant, long-suffering and benignant heart, purity of mind and
body, tranquil firmness and steadfastness, self-control and a masterful
government of the lower nature and the heart's worship given to the Teacher,
whether to the divine Teacher within or to the human Master in whom the divine
Wisdom is embodied, – for that is the sense of the reverence given to the Guru.
Then there is a nobler and freer attitude towards the outward world, an attitude
of perfect detachment and equality, a firm removal of the natural being's
attraction to the objects of the senses and a radical freedom from the claims
of that constant clamorous ego-sense, ego-
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idea, ego-motive which tyrannises
over the normal man. There is no longer any clinging to the attachment and
absorption of family and home. There is instead of these vital and animal
movements an unattached will and sense and intelligence, a keen perception of
the defective nature of the ordinary life of physical man with its aimless and
painful subjection to birth and death and disease and age, a constant equalness
to all pleasant or unpleasant happenings, – for the soul is seated within and impervious
to the shocks of external events, – and
a meditative mind turned towards solitude and away from the vain noise of
crowds and the assemblies of men. Finally, there is a strong turn within
towards the things that really matter, a philosophic perception of the true
sense and large principles of existence, a tranquil continuity of inner
spiritual knowledge and light, the Yoga of an unswerving devotion, love of God,
the heart's deep and constant adoration of the universal and eternal Presence.
The one object to which the mind of spiritual
knowledge must be turned is the Eternal by fixity in whom the soul clouded here
and swathed in the mists of Nature recovers and enjoys its native and original
consciousness of immortality and transcendence. To be fixed on the transient,
to be limited in the phenomenon is to accept mortality; the constant truth in things
that perish is that in them which is inward and immutable. The soul when it
allows itself to be tyrannised over by the appearances of Nature, misses itself
and goes whirling about in the cycle of the births and deaths of its bodies.
There, passionately following without end the mutations of personality and its
interests, it cannot draw back to the possession of its impersonal and unborn
self-existence. To be able to do that is to find oneself and get back to one's
true being, that which assumes these births but does not perish with the
perishing of its forms. To enjoy the eternity to which birth and life are only outward
circumstances, is the soul's true immortality and transcendence. That Eternal
or that Eternity is the Brahman. Brahman is That which is transcendent and That
which is universal: it is the free spirit who supports in front the play of
soul with nature and assures behind their imperishable oneness; it is at once
the mutable and the immutable, the All that is the One. In his highest
supracosmic
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status Brahman is a transcendent
Eternity without origin or change far above the phenomenal oppositions of
existence and non-existence, persistence and transience between which the
outward world moves. But once seen in the substance and light of this eternity,
the world also becomes other than it seems to the mind and senses; for then we
see the universe no longer as a whirl of mind and life and matter or a mass of
the determinations of energy and substance, but as no other than this eternal
Brahman. A spirit who immeasurably fills and surrounds all this movement with
himself – for indeed the movement too is himself – and
who throws on all that is finite the splendour of his garment of infinity, a
bodiless and million-bodied spirit whose hands of strength and feet of
swiftness are on every side of us, whose heads and eyes and faces are those
innumerable visages which we see wherever we turn, whose ear is everywhere listening
to the silence of eternity and the music of the worlds, is the universal Being
in whose embrace we live.
All relations of Soul and Nature are
circumstances in the eternity of Brahman; sense and quality, their reflectors
and constituents, are this supreme Soul's devices for the presentation of the
workings that his own energy in things constantly liberates into movement. He
is himself beyond the limitation of the senses, sees all things but not with
the physical eye, hears all things but not with the physical ear, is aware of
all things but not with the limiting mind – mind
which represents but cannot truly know. Not determined by any qualities, he
possesses and determines in his substance all qualities and enjoys this
qualitative action of his own Nature. He is attached to nothing, bound by
nothing, fixed to nothing that he does; calm, he supports in a large and immortal
freedom all the action and movement and passion of his universal Shakti. He
becomes all that is in the universe; that which is in us is he and all that we
experience outside ourselves is he. The inward and the outward, the far and the
near, the moving and the unmoving, all this he is at once. He is the subtlety
of the subtle which is beyond our knowledge, even as he is the density of force
and substance which offers itself to the grasp of our minds. He is indivisible
and the One, but seems to divide himself in forms and creatures and appears as
all these
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separate existences. All things
can get back in him, can return in the Spirit to the indivisible unity of their
self-existence. All is eternally born from him, upborne in his eternity, taken
eternally back into his oneness. He is the light of all lights and luminous
beyond all the darkness of our ignorance. He is knowledge and the object of
knowledge. The spiritual supramental knowledge that floods the illumined mind
and transfigures it is this spirit manifesting himself in light to the
force-obscured soul which he has put forth into the action of Nature. This
eternal Light is in the heart of every being; it is he who is the secret knower
of the field, ksetrajña, and
presides as the Lord in the heart of things over this province and over all
these kingdoms of his manifested becoming and action. When man sees this
eternal and universal Godhead within himself, when he becomes aware of the soul
in all things and discovers the spirit in Nature, when he feels all the
universe as a wave mounting in this Eternity and all that is as the one
existence, he puts on the light of Godhead and stands free in the midst of the
worlds of Nature. A divine knowledge and a perfect turning with adoration to
this Divine is the secret of the great spiritual liberation. Freedom, love and
spiritual knowledge raise us from mortal nature to immortal being.
The Soul and
Nature are only two aspects of the eternal Brahman, an apparent duality which
founds the operations of his universal existence. The Soul is without origin
and eternal, Nature too is without origin and eternal; but the modes of Nature
and the lower forms she assumes to our conscious experience have an origin in
the transactions of these two entities. They come from her, wear by her the
outward chain of cause and effect, doing and the results of doing, force and
its workings, all that is here transient and mutable. Constantly they change
and the soul and Nature seem to change with them, but in themselves these two
powers are eternal and always the same. Nature creates and acts, the Soul
enjoys her creation and action; but in this inferior form of her action she
turns this enjoyment into the obscure and petty figures of pain and pleasure.
Forcibly the soul, the individual Purusha, is attracted by her qualitative
workings and this attraction of her qualities draws him constantly to births of
all kinds in which he enjoys the variations and vicissitudes,
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the good and evil of birth in
Nature. But this is only the outward experience of the soul mutable in
conception by identification with mutable Nature. Seated in this body is her
and our Divinity, the supreme Self, Paramatman, the supreme Soul, the mighty
Lord of Nature, who watches her action, sanctions her operations, upholds all she
does, commands her manifold creation, enjoys with his universal delight this
play of her figures of his own being. That is the self-knowledge to which we
have to accustom our mentality before we can truly know ourselves as an eternal
portion of the Eternal. Once that is fixed, no matter how the soul in us may
comport itself outwardly in its transactions with Nature, whatever it may seem
to do or however it may seem to assume this or that figure of personality and
active force and embodied ego, it is in itself free, no longer bound to birth
because one through impersonality of self with the inner unborn spirit of
existence. That impersonality is our union with the supreme egoless I of all
that is in cosmos.
This knowledge comes by an inner meditation
through which the eternal self becomes apparent to us in our own self-existence.
Or it comes by the Yoga of the Sankhyas, the separation of the soul from
nature. Or it comes by the Yoga of works in which the personal will is
dissolved through the opening up of our mind and heart and all our active
forces to the Lord who assumes to himself the whole of our works in nature. The
spiritual knowledge may be awakened by the urging of the spirit within us, its
call to this or that Yoga, this or that way of oneness. Or it may come to us by
hearing of the truth from others and the moulding of the mind into the sense of
that to which it listens with faith and concentration. But however arrived at,
it carries us beyond death to immortality. Knowledge shows us high above the
mutable transactions of the soul with the mortality of nature our highest Self
as the supreme Lord of her actions, one and equal in all objects and creatures,
not born in the taking up of a body, not subject to death in the perishing of
all these bodies. That is the true seeing, the seeing of that in us which is
eternal and immortal. As we perceive more and more this equal spirit in all
things, we pass into that equality of the spirit; as we dwell more and more in
this universal being, we become ourselves universal
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beings; as we grow more and more
aware of this eternal, we put on our own eternity and are for ever. We identify
ourselves with the eternity of the self and no longer with the limitation and
distress of our mental and physical ignorance. Then we see that all our works
are an evolution and operation of Nature and our real self not the executive
doer, but the free witness and lord and unattached enjoyer of the action. All
this surface of cosmic movement is a diverse becoming of natural existences in
the one eternal Being, all is extended, manifested, rolled out by the universal
Energy from the seeds of her Idea deep in his existence; but the spirit even
though it takes up and enjoys her workings in this body of ours, is not
affected by its mortality because it is eternal beyond birth and death, is not
limited by the personalities which it multiply assumes in her because it is the
one supreme self of all these personalities, is not changed by the mutations of
quality because it is itself undetermined by quality, does not act even in
action, kartāram api akartāram,
because it supports natural action in a perfect spiritual freedom from its
effects, is the originator indeed of all activities, but in no way changed or
affected by the play of its Nature. As the all-pervading ether is not affected
or changed by the multiple forms it assumes, but remains always the same pure
subtle original substance, even so this spirit when it has done and become all possible
things, remains through it all the same pure immutable subtle infinite essence.
That is the supreme status of the soul, parā
gatih, that is the divine being and
nature, madbhāva, and whoever
arrives at spiritual knowledge, rises to that supreme immortality of the
Eternal.
This Brahman, this eternal and spiritual
knower of the field of his own natural becoming, this Nature, his perpetual energy,
which converts herself into that field, this immortality of the soul in mortal
nature, – these things together make
the whole reality of our existence. The spirit within, when we turn to it,
illumines the entire field of Nature with its own truth in all the splendour of
its rays. In the light of that sun of knowledge the eye of knowledge opens in
us and we live in that truth and no longer in this ignorance. Then we perceive
that our limitation to our present mental and physical nature was an error of
the darkness,
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then we are liberated from the
law of the lower Prakriti, the law of the mind and body, then we attain to the supreme
nature of the spirit. That splendid and lofty change is the last, the divine
and infinite becoming, the putting off of mortal nature, the putting on of an
immortal existence.
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