FOURTEEN
Above the Gunas*
The distinctions
between the Soul and Nature rapidly drawn in the verses of the thirteenth
chapter by a few decisive epithets, a few brief but packed characterisations
of their separate power and functioning, and especially the distinction between
the embodied soul subjected to the action of Nature by its enjoyment of her
gunas, qualities or modes and the Supreme Soul which dwells enjoying the gunas,
but not subject because it is itself beyond them, are the basis on which the Gita
rests its whole idea of the liberated being made one in the conscious law of
its existence with the Divine. That liberation, that oneness, that putting on
of the divine nature, sādharmya,
it declares to be the very essence of spiritual freedom and the whole
significance of immortality. This supreme importance assigned to sādharmya is
a capital point in the teaching of the Gita.
To be immortal was never held in the ancient
spiritual teaching to consist merely in a personal survival of the death of the
body: all beings are immortal in that sense and it is only the forms that
perish. The souls that do not arrive at liberation, live through the returning aeons; all exist involved or secret in the Brahman during
the dissolution of the manifest worlds and are born again in the appearance of
a new cycle. Pralaya, the end of a cycle of aeons, is the temporary disintegration of a universal form
of existence and of all the individual forms which move in its rounds, but that
is only a momentary pause, a silent interval followed by an outburst of new
creation, reintegration and reconstruction in which they reappear and recover the
impetus of their progression. Our physical death is also a pralaya,—
the Gita will presently use the word in the sense of this death, pralayam yāti deha-bhrt, “the soul bearing the body
comes to a
* Gita, XIV.
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pralaya,” to a disintegration of that form of matter with which
its ignorance identified its being and which now dissolves into the natural
elements. But the soul itself persists and after an interval resumes in a new
body formed from those elements its round of births in the cycle, just as after
the interval of pause and cessation the universal Being resumes his endless
round of the cyclic aeons. This immortality in the
rounds of Time is common to all embodied spirits.
To be immortal
in the deeper sense is something different from this survival of death and this
constant recurrence. Immortality is that supreme status in which the Spirit
knows itself to be superior to death and birth, not conditioned by the nature
of its manifestation, infinite, imperishable, immutably eternal,— immortal,
because never being born it never dies. The divine Purushottama,
who is the supreme Lord and supreme Brahman, possesses for ever this immortal
eternity and is not affected by his taking up a body or by his continuous
assumption of cosmic forms and powers because he exists always in this
self-knowledge. His very nature is to be unchangeably conscious of his own
eternity; he is self-aware without end or beginning. He is here the Inhabitant
of all bodies, but as the unborn in every body, not limited in his
consciousness by that manifestation, not identified with the physical nature
which he assumes; for that is only a minor circumstance of his universal activised play of existence. Liberation, immortality is to
live in this unchangeably conscious eternal being of the Purushottama.1
But to arrive here at this greater spiritual immortality the embodied soul must
cease to live according to the law of the lower nature; it must put on the law
of the Divine's supreme way of existence which is in fact the real law of its
own eternal essence. In the spiritual evolution of its becoming, no less than
in its secret original being, it must grow into the likeness of the Divine.
1 Mark that nowhere in the Gita is there any
indication that dissolution of the individual spiritual being into the unmanifest, indefinable or absolute Brahman, avyaktam anirdeśyam,
is the true meaning or condition of immortality or the true aim of Yoga. On the
contrary it describes immortality later on as an indwelling in the Ishwara in his supreme status, mayi nivasisyasi, param dhāma, and here as sādharmya, parām siddhim, a supreme
perfection, a becoming of one law of being and nature with the Supreme,
persistent still in existence and conscious of the universal movement but above
it, as all the sages still exist, munayah sarve, not bound to birth
in the creation, not troubled by the dissolution of the cycles.
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And
this great thing, to rise from the human into the divine nature, we can only do
by an effort of Godward knowledge, will and
adoration. For the soul sent forth by the Supreme as his eternal portion, his immortal
representative into the workings of universal Nature is yet obliged by the
character of those workings, avaśam prakrter vaśāt, to identify itself in its external
consciousness with her limiting conditions, to identify itself with a life,
mind and body that are oblivious of their inner spiritual reality and of the
innate Godhead. To get back to self-knowledge and to the knowledge of the real
as distinct from the apparent relations of the soul with Nature, to know God
and ourselves and the world with a spiritual and no longer with a physical or externalised experience, through the deepest truth of the
inner soul-consciousness and not through the misleading phenomenal
significances of the sense-mind and the outward understanding, is an
indispensable means of this perfection. Perfection cannot come without
self-knowledge and God-knowledge and a spiritual attitude towards our natural existence,
and that is why the ancient wisdom laid so much stress on salvation by
knowledge,— not an intellectual cognizance of things, but a growing of man the
mental being into a greater spiritual consciousness. The soul's salvation cannot
come without the soul's perfection, without its growing into the divine nature;
the impartial Godhead will not effect it for us by an act of caprice or an
arbitrary sanad
of his favour. Divine works are effective for salvation because they lead us
towards this perfection and to a knowledge of self and nature and God by a
growing unity with the inner Master of our existence. Divine love is effective
because by it we grow into the likeness of the sole and supreme object of our
adoration and call down the answering love of the Highest to flood us with the
light of his knowledge and the uplifting power and purity of his eternal
spirit. Therefore, says the Gita, this is the supreme knowledge and the highest
of all knowings because it leads to the highest
perfection and spiritual status, parām siddhim, and brings the soul to likeness with the Divine, sādharmya.
It is the eternal wisdom, the great spiritual experience by which all the sages
attained to that highest perfection, grew into one law of being
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with the Supreme and live for
ever in his eternity, not born in the creation, not troubled by the anguish of
the universal dissolution. This perfection, then, this sādharmya is the way of immortality
and the indispensable condition without which the soul cannot consciously live
in the Eternal.
The soul of man
could not grow into the likeness of the Divine, if it were not in its secret
essence imperishably one with the Divine and part and parcel of his divinity:
it could not be or become immortal if it were merely a creature of mental,
vital and physical Nature. All existence is a manifestation of the divine
Existence and that which is within us is spirit of the eternal Spirit. We have
come indeed into the lower material nature and are under its influence, but we
have come there from the supreme spiritual nature: this inferior imperfect
status is our apparent, but that our real being. The Eternal puts all this
movement forth as his self-creation. He is at once the Father and Mother of the
universe; the substance of the infinite Idea, vijñana, the Mahad
Brahman, is the womb into which he casts the seed of his self-conception. As
the Over-Soul he casts the seed; as the Mother, the Nature-Soul, the Energy
filled with his conscious power, he receives it into this infinite substance of
being made pregnant with his illimitable, yet self-limiting Idea. He receives
into this Vast of self-conception and develops there the divine embryo into
mental and physical form of existence born from the original act of conceptive creation.
All we see springs from that act of creation; but that which is born here is
only finite idea and form of the unborn and infinite. The Spirit is eternal and
superior to all its manifestation: Nature, eternal without beginning in the
Spirit, proceeds for ever with the rhythm of the cycles by unending act of
creation and unconcluding act of cessation; the Soul
too which takes on this or that form in Nature, is no less eternal than she, anādi ubhav api. Even while
in Nature it follows the unceasing round of the cycles, it is, in the Eternal from
which it proceeds into them, for ever raised above the terms of birth and
death, and even in its apparent consciousness here it can become aware of that
innate and constant transcendence.
What is it then that makes the difference,
what is it that
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gets the soul
into the appearance of birth and death and bondage,— for this is patent that it
is only an appearance? It is a subordinate act or state of consciousness, it is
a self-oblivious identification with the modes of Nature in the limited
workings of this lower motivity and with this self-wrapped
ego-bounded knot of action of the mind, life and body. To rise above the modes
of Nature, to be traigunyātita,
is indispensable, if we are to get back into our fully conscious being away
from the obsessing power of the lower action and to put on the free nature of
the spirit and its eternal immortality. That condition of the sādharmya is
what the Gita next proceeds to develop. It has already alluded to it and laid
it down with a brief emphasis in a previous chapter; but it has now to indicate
more precisely what are these modes, these gunas, how
they bind the soul and keep it back from spiritual freedom and what is meant by
rising above the modes of Nature.
The modes of
Nature are all qualitative in their essence and are called for that reason its gunas or qualities. In any spiritual conception of the
universe this must be so, because the connecting medium between spirit and
matter must be psyche or soul power and the primary action psychological and
qualitative, not physical and quantitative; for quality is the immaterial, the
more spiritual element in all the action of the universal Energy, her prior
dynamics. The predominance of physical Science has accustomed us to a different
view of Nature, because there the first thing that strikes us is the importance
of the quantitative aspect of her workings and her dependence for the creation
of forms on quantitative combinations and dispositions. And yet even there the
discovery that matter is rather substance or act of energy than energy a motive
power of self-existent material substance or an inherent power acting in matter
has led to some revival of an older reading of universal Nature. The analysis
of the ancient Indian thinkers allowed for the quantitative action of Nature, mātrā; but that it regarded as proper to its more
objective and formally executive working, while the innately ideative executive power which disposes things according to
the quality of their being and energy, guna, svabhāva,
is the primary determinant and underlies all the
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outer quantitative
dispositions. In the basis of the physical world this is not apparent only
because there the underlying ideative spirit, the Mahad Brahman, is overlaid and hidden up by the movement of
matter and material energy. But even in the physical world the miraculous varying
results of different combinations and quantities of elements otherwise
identical with each other admits of no conceivable explanation if there is not
a superior power of variative quality of which these
material dispositions are only the convenient mechanical devices. Or let us say
at once, there must be a secret ideative capacity of
the universal energy, vijñana,—
even if we suppose that energy and its instrumental idea, buddhi, to be themselves
mechanical in their nature,— which fixes the mathematics and decides the
resultants of these outer dispositions: it is the omnipotent Idea in the spirit
which invents and makes use of these devices. And in the vital and mental
existence quality at once openly appears as the primary power and amount of
energy is only a secondary factor. But in fact the mental, the vital, the
physical existence are all subject to the limitations of quality, all are
governed by its determinations, even though that truth seems more and more
obscured as we descend the scale of existence. Only the Spirit, which by the
power of its idea-being and its idea-force called mahat and vijñāna fixes these conditions, is not so determined, not subject to any
limitations either of quality or quantity because its immeasurable and
indeterminable infinity is superior to the modes which it develops and uses for
its creation.
But, again, the whole qualitative action of
Nature, so infinitely intricate in its detail and variety, is figured as cast
into the mould of three general modes of quality everywhere present,
intertwined, almost inextricable, sattva, rajas, tamas. These modes are described in the Gita only by
their psychological action in man, or incidentally in things such as food
according as they produce a psychological or vital effect on human beings. If
we look for a more general definition, we shall perhaps catch a glimpse of it
in the symbolic idea of Indian religion which attributes each of these
qualities respectively to one member of the cosmic Trinity, sattwa
to the preserver Vishnu, Rajas
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to the creator
Brahma, Tamas to the destroyer Rudra.
Looking behind this idea for the rationale of the triple ascription, we might
define the three modes or qualities in terms of the motion of the universal
Energy as Nature's three concomitant and inseparable powers of equilibrium,
kinesis and inertia. But that is only their appearance in terms of the external
action of Force. It is otherwise if we regard consciousness and force as twin terms
of the one Existence, always coexistent in the reality of being, however in the
primal outward phenomenon of material Nature light of consciousness may seem to
disappear in a vast action of nescient unillumined
energy, while at an opposite pole of spiritual quiescence action of force may
seem to disappear in the stillness of the observing or witness consciousness. These
two conditions are the two extremes of an apparently separated Purusha and Prakriti, but each at
its extreme point does not abolish but at the most only conceals its eternal
mate in the depths of its own characteristic way of being. Therefore, since
consciousness is always there even in an apparently inconscient
Force, we must find a corresponding psychological power of these three modes
which informs their more outward executive action. On their psychological side the
three qualities may be defined, Tamas as Nature's
power of nescience, rajas as her power of active seeking ignorance enlightened
by desire and impulsion, Sattwa as her power of
possessing and harmonising knowledge.
The three qualitative modes of Nature are
inextricably intertwined in all cosmic existence. Tamas,
the principle of inertia, is a passive and inert nescience which suffers all
shocks and contacts without any effort of mastering response and by itself
would lead to a disintegration of the whole action of the energy and a radical
dispersion of substance. But it is driven by the kinetic power of rajas and
even in the nescience of Matter is met and embraced by an innate though unpossessed preserving principle of harmony and balance and
knowledge. Material energy appears to be tamasic in
its basic action, jada,
nescient, mechanic and in movement disintegrative. But it is dominated by a
huge force and impulsion of mute rajasic kinesis
which drives it, even in and even by its dispersion and disinte-
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gration,
to build and create and again by a sattwic ideative element in its apparently inconscient
force which is always imposing a harmony and preservative order on the two
opposite tendencies. Rajas, the principle of creative endeavour
and motion and impulsion in Prakriti, kinesis, pravrtti, so seen
in Matter, appears more evidently as a conscious or half-conscious passion of
seeking and desire and action in the dominant character of Life,— for that
passion is the nature of all vital existence. And it would lead by itself in
its own nature to a persistent but always mutable and unstable life and
activity and creation without any settled result. But met on one side by the disintegrating
power of tamas with death and decay and inertia, its
ignorant action is on the other side of its functioning settled and harmonised and sustained by the power of Sattwa, subconscient in the lower
forms of life, more and more conscient in the
emergence of mentality, most conscious in the effort of the evolved
intelligence figuring as will and reason in the fully developed mental being. Sattwa, the principle of understanding knowledge and of
according assimilation, measure and equilibrium, which by itself would lead
only to some lasting concord of fixed and luminous harmonies, is in the motions
of this world impelled to follow the mutable strife and action of the eternal
kinesis and constantly overpowered or hedged in by the forces of inertia and
nescience. This is the appearance of a world governed by the interlocked and
mutually limited play of the three qualitative modes of Nature.
The Gita applies
this generalised analysis of the universal Energy to
the psychological nature of man in relation to his bondage to Prakriti and the realisation of
spiritual freedom. Sattwa, it tells us, is by the
purity of its quality a cause of light and illumination and by virtue of that
purity it produces no disease or morbidity or suffering in the nature. When
into all the doors in the body there comes a flooding of light, as if the doors
and windows of a closed house were opened to sunshine, a light of
understanding, perception and knowledge, – when the intelligence is alert and
illumined, the senses quickened, the whole mentality satisfied and full of
brightness and the nervous being calmed and filled with an illumined ease and
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clarity, prasāda, one should
understand that there has been a great increase and uprising of the sattwic guna in the nature. For
knowledge and a harmonious ease and pleasure and happiness are the
characteristic results of sattwa. The pleasure that
is sattwic is not only that contentment which an
inner clarity of satisfied will and intelligence brings with it, but all
delight and content produced by the soul's possession of itself in light or by
an accord or an adequate and truthful adjustment between the regarding soul and
the surrounding Nature and her offered objects of desire and perception.
Rajas, again,
the Gita tells us, has for its essence attraction of liking and longing. Rajas
is a child of the attachment of the soul to the desire of objects; it is born
from the nature's thirst for an unpossessed
satisfaction. It is therefore full of unrest and fever and lust and greed and
excitement, a thing of seeking impulsions, and all this mounts in us when the
middle Guna increases. It is the force of desire
which motives all ordinary personal initiative of action and all that movement
of stir and seeking and propulsion in our nature which is the impetus towards
action and works, pravrtti. Rajas, then, is evidently
the kinetic force in the modes of Nature. Its fruit is the lust of action, but
also grief, pain, all kinds of suffering; for it has no right possession of its
object — desire in fact implies non-possession — and even its pleasure of
acquired possession is troubled and unstable because it has not clear knowledge
and does not know how to possess nor can it find the secret of accord and right
enjoyment. All the ignorant and passionate seeking of life belongs to the rajasic mode of Nature.
Tamas, finally, is
born of inertia and ignorance and its fruit too is inertia and ignorance. It is
the darkness of Tamas which obscures knowledge and
causes all confusion and delusion. Therefore it is the opposite of Sattwa, for the essence of Sattwa
is enlightenment, prakāśa,
and the essence of Tamas is absence of light,
nescience, aprakāśa.
But Tamas brings
incapacity and negligence of action as well as the incapacity and
negligence of error, inattention and misunderstanding or non-understanding;
indolence, languor and sleep belong to this Guna.
Therefore it is the opposite too of Rajas; for the essence of Rajas is movement
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and impulsion and kinesis, pravrtti, but the
essence of Tamas is inertia, apravrtti. Tamas
is inertia of nescience and inertia of inaction, a double negative.
These three qualities of Nature are evidently
present and active in all human beings and none can be said to be quite devoid
of one and another or free from any one of the three; none is cast in the mould
of one Guna to the exclusion of the others. All men
have in them in whatever degree the rajasic impulse
of desire and activity and the sattwic boon of light
and happiness, some balance, some adjustment of mind to itself and its
surroundings and objects, and all have their share of tamasic
incapacity and ignorance or nescience. But these qualities are not constant in
any man in the quantitative action of their force or in the combination of
their elements; for they are variable and in a continual state of mutual
impact, displacement and interaction. Now one leads, now another increases and
predominates, and each subjects us to its characteristic action and
consequences. Only by a general and ordinary predominance of one or other of
the qualities can a man be said to be either sattwic
or rajasic or tamasic in
his nature; but this can only be a general and not an exclusive or absolute
description. The three qualities are a triple power which by their interaction
determine the character and disposition and through that and its various
motions the actions of the natural man. But this triple power is at the same
time a triple cord of bondage. “The three Gunas born
of Prakriti” says the Gita “bind in the body the
imperishable dweller in the body.” In a certain sense we can see at once that
there must be this bondage in following the action of the Gunas;
for they are all limited by their finite of quality and operation and cause
limitation. Tamas is on both its sides an incapacity
and therefore very obviously binds to limitation. Rajasic
desire as an initiator of action is a more positive power, but still we can see
well enough that desire with its limiting and engrossing hold on man must
always be a bondage. But how does Sattwa, the power
of knowledge and happiness, become a chain? It so becomes because it is a
principle of mental nature, a principle of limited and limiting knowledge and
of a happiness which depends upon right fol-
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lowing or attainment of this or
that object or else on particular states of the mentality, on a light of mind
which can be only a more or less clear twilight. Its pleasure can only be a
passing intensity or a qualified ease. Other is the infinite spiritual
knowledge and the free self-existent delight of our spiritual being.
But then there is the question, how does our
infinite and imperishable spirit, even involved in Nature, come thus to confine
itself to the lower action of Prakriti and undergo
this bondage and how is it not, like the supreme spirit of which it is a
portion, free in its infinity even while enjoying the self-limitations of its
active evolution? The reason, says the Gita, is our attachment to the Gunas and to the result of their workings. Sattwa, it says, attaches to happiness, rajas attaches to
action, Tamas covers up the knowledge and attaches to
negligence of error and inaction. Or again, “Sattwa
binds by attachment to knowledge and attachment to happiness, rajas binds the
embodied spirit by attachment to works,Tamas binds by
negligence and indolence and sleep.” In other words, the soul by attachment to
the enjoyment of the Gunas and their results concentrates
its consciousness on the lower and outward action of life, mind and body in
Nature, imprisons itself in the form of these things and becomes oblivious of
its own greater consciousness behind in the spirit, unaware of the free power
and scope of the liberating Purusha. Evidently, in
order to be liberated and perfect, we must get back from these things, away from
the Gunas and above them and return to the power of
that free spiritual consciousness above Nature.
But this would seem to imply a cessation of
all doing, since all natural action is done by the Gunas,
by Nature through her modes. The soul cannot act by itself, it can only act
through Nature and her modes. And yet the Gita, while it demands freedom from
the modes, insists upon the necessity of action. Here comes in the importance
of its insistence on the abandonment of the fruits; for it is the desire of the
fruits which is the most potent cause of the soul's bondage and by abandoning
it the soul can be free in action. Ignorance is the result of tamasic action, pain the consequence of rajasic
works, pain of reaction, dis-
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appointment, dissatisfaction or
transience, and therefore in attachment to the fruits of this kind of activity
attended as they are with these undesirable accompaniments there is no profit.
But of works rightly done the fruit is pure and sattwic,
the inner result is knowledge and happiness. Yet attachment even to these
pleasurable things must be entirely abandoned, first, because in the mind they
are limited and limiting forms and, secondly, because, since Sattwa is constantly entangled with and besieged by rajas
and tamas which may at any moment overcome it, there
is a perpetual insecurity in their tenure. But, even if one is free from any
clinging to the fruit, there may be an attachment to the work itself, either
for its own sake, the essential rajasic bond, or
owing to a lax subjection to the drive of Nature, the tamasic,
or for the sake of the attracting rightness of the thing done, which is the sattwic attaching cause powerful on the virtuous man or the
man of knowledge. And here evidently the resource is in that other injunction
of the Gita, to give up the action itself to the Lord of works and be only a desireless and equal-minded instrument of his will. To see
that the modes of Nature are the whole agency and cause of our works and to
know and turn to that which is supreme above the Gunas,
is the way to rise above the lower nature. Only so can we attain to the movement
and status of the Divine, madbhāva, by which free from subjection to birth and death
and their concomitants, decay, old age and suffering, the liberated soul shall
enjoy in the end immortality and all that is eternal.
But what, asks Arjuna,
are the signs of such a man, what his action and how is he said even in action
to be above the three Gunas? The sign, says Krishna,
is that equality of which I have so constantly spoken; the sign is that
inwardly he regards happiness and suffering alike, gold and mud and stone as of
equal value and that to him the pleasant and the unpleasant, praise and blame,
honour and insult, the faction of his friends and the faction of his enemies
are equal things. He is steadfast in a wise imperturbable and immutable inner
calm and quietude. He initiates no action, but leaves all works to be done by
the Gunas of Nature. Sattwa,
rajas or Tamas may rise or cease in his outer
mentality and his physical movements with their results of
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enlightenment, of impulsion to
works or of inaction and the clouding over of the mental and nervous being, but
he does not rejoice when this comes or that ceases, nor on the other hand does
he abhor or shrink from the operation or the cessation of these things. He has
seated himself in the conscious light of another principle than the nature of
the Gunas and that greater consciousness remains
steadfast in him, above these powers and unshaken by their motions like the sun
above clouds to one who has risen into a higher atmosphere. He from that height
sees that it is the Gunas that are in process of
action and that their storm and calm are not himself but only a movement of Prakriti; his self is immovable above and his spirit does
not participate in that shifting mutability of things unstable. This is the
impersonality of the Brahmic status; for that higher
principle, that greater wide high-seated consciousness, kūtastha, is the immutable
Brahman.
But still there is evidently here a double
status, there is a scission of the being between two opposites; a liberated
spirit in the immutable Self or Brahman watches the action of an unliberated mutable Nature,—Akshara
and Kshara. Is there no greater status, no principle
of more absolute perfection, or is this division the highest consciousness possible
in the body, and is the end of Yoga to drop the mutable nature and the Gunas born of the embodiment in Nature and disappear into
the impersonality and everlasting peace of the Brahman? Is that laya or
dissolution of the individual Purusha the greatest liberation?
There is, it would seem, something else; for the Gita says at the close, always
returning to this one final note, “He also who loves and strives after Me with
an undeviating love and adoration, passes beyond the three Gunas
and he too is prepared for becoming the Brahman.” This “I” is the Purushottama who is the foundation of the silent Brahman
and of immortality and imperishable spiritual existence and of the eternal
dharma and of an utter bliss of happiness. There is a status then which is greater
than the peace of the Akshara as it watches unmoved the
strife of the gunas. There is a highest spiritual
experience and foundation above the immutability of the Brahman, there is an
eternal dharma greater than the rajasic impulsion to
works, pravrtti,
there is an absolute delight which is untouched by rajasic
suffer-
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ring and beyond the sattwic happiness, and these things are found and possessed
by dwelling in the being and power of the Purushottama.
But since it is acquired by bhakti, its status must
be that divine delight, Ananda, in which is experienced
the union of utter love1 and possessing oneness, the crown of bhakti. And to rise into that Ananda,
into that imperishable oneness must be the completion of spiritual perfection
and the fulfilment of the eternal immortalising
dharma.
1niratśayapremāspadatvam ānandatattvam.
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