SEVENTEEN
Deva and Asura*
THE practical difficulty of the
change from the ignorant and shackled normal nature of man to the dynamic
freedom of a divine and spiritual being will be apparent if we ask ourselves,
more narrowly, how the transition can be effected from the fettered embarrassed
functioning of the three qualities to the infinite action of the liberated man
who is no longer subject to the Gunas. The transition
is indispensable; for it is clearly laid down that he must be above or else
without the three Gunas, trigunātīta, nistraigunya. On
the other hand it is no less clearly, no less emphatically laid down that in
every natural existence here on earth the three Gunas
are there in their inextricable working and it is even said that all action of
man or creature or force is merely the action of these three modes upon each
other, a functioning in which one or other predominates and the rest modify its
operation and results, gunā
gunesu vartante. How
then can there be another dynamic and kinetic nature or any other kind of
works? To act is to be subject to the three qualities of Nature; to be beyond
these conditions of her working is to be silent in the Spirit. The Ishwara, the
Supreme who is master of all her works and functions and guides and determines
them by his divine will, is indeed above this mechanism of quality, not touched
or limited by her modes, but still it would seem that he acts always through
them, always shapes by the power of the swabhava and
through the psychological machinery of the Gunas.
These three are fundamental properties of Prakriti, necessary operations of the
executive Nature-force which takes shape here in us, and the Jiva himself is only a portion of the Divine in this
Prakriti. If then the liberated man still does works, still moves in the
kinetic movement, it must be so that he moves and acts, in Nature and by the
limitation of her qualities, subject to their reactions, not,
*Gita, XVI.
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in so far as the natural part of
him persists, in the freedom of the Divine. But the Gita has said exactly the
opposite, that the liberated Yogin is delivered from
the guna reactions and whatever he does, however he lives, moves and acts in
God, in the power of his freedom and immortality, in the law of the supreme
eternal Infinite, sarvathā
vartamāno’pi
sa yogī mayi vartate. There seems
here to be a contradiction, an impasse.
But this is only when we knot ourselves up in
the rigid logical oppositions of the analytic mind, not when we look freely and
subtly at the nature of spirit and at the spirit in Nature. What moves the
world is not really the modes of Prakriti,— these are
only the lower aspect, the mechanism of our normal nature. The real motive
power is a divine spiritual Will which uses at present these inferior
conditions, but is itself not limited, not dominated, not mechanised,
as is the human will, by the Gunas. No doubt, since
these modes are so universal in their action, they must proceed from something
inherent in the power of the Spirit; there must be powers in the divine Will-force
from which these from aspects of Prakriti have their origin. For everything in
the lower normal nature is derived the higher spiritual power of being of the Purushottama, mattah pravartate; it does not come into being de novo and without
a spiritual cause. Something in the essential power of the spirit there must be
from which the sattwic light and satisfaction, the rajasic kinesis, the tamasic
inertia of our nature are derivations and of which they are the imperfect or
degraded forms. But once we get back to these sources in their purity above
this imperfection and degradation of them in which we live, we shall find that
these motions put on a quite different aspect as soon as we begin to live in
the spirit. Being and action and the modes of being and action become
altogether different things, far above their present limited appearance.
For what is
behind this troubled kinesis of the cosmos with all its clash and struggle?
What is it that when it touches the mind, when it puts on mental values, creates
the reactions of desire, striving, straining, error of will, sorrow, sin, pain?
It is a will of the spirit in movement, it is a large divine will in action
which is not touched by these things; it is a power of the free
1tapas, cit-śakti.
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and infinite conscious Godhead
which has no desire because it exercises a universal possession and a spontaneous
Ananda of its movements. Wearied by no striving and
straining, it enjoys a free mastery of its means and its objects; misled by no
error of the will, it holds a knowledge of self and things which is the source
of its mastery and its Ananda; overcome by no sorrow,
sin or pain, it has the joy and purity of its being and the joy and purity of
its power. The soul that lives in God acts by this spiritual will and not by
the normal will of the unliberated mind: its kinesis
takes place by this spiritual force and not by the rajasic
mode of Nature, precisely because it no longer lives in the lower movement to which
that deformation belongs, but has got back in the divine nature to the pure and
perfect sense of the kinesis.
And again what
is behind the inertia of Nature, behind this Tamas
which, when complete, makes her action like the blind driving of a machine, a
mechanical impetus unobservant of anything except the groove in which it is set
to spin and not conscious even of the law of that motion,— this Tamas that turns cessation of the accustomed action into
death and disintegration and becomes in the mind a power for inaction and
ignorance? This tamas is an obscurity which
mistranslates, we may say, into inaction of power and inaction of knowledge the
Spirit's eternal principle of calm and repose — the repose which the Divine
never loses even while he acts, the eternal repose which supports his integral
action of knowledge and the force of his creative will both there in its own
infinities and here in an apparent limitation of its working and
self-awareness. The peace of the Godhead is not a disintegration of energy or a
vacant inertia; it would keep all that Infinity has known and done gathered up
and concentratedly conscious in an omnipotent silence
even if the Power everywhere ceased for a time actively to know and create. The
Eternal does not need to sleep or rest; he does not get tired and flag; he has
no need of a pause to refresh and recreate his exhausted energies; for his
energy is inexhaustibly the same, indefatigable and infinite. The Godhead is
calm and at rest in the midst of his action; and on the other hand his very
cessation of action would retain in it the full power and all the
potentialities of his kinesis. The liberated soul enters into this
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calm and participates in the
eternal repose of the spirit. This is known to everyone who has had any taste
at all of the joy of liberation, that it contains an eternal power of calm. And
that profound tranquillity can remain in the very
heart of action, can persevere in the most violent motion of forces. There may
be an impetuous flood of thought, doing, will, movement, an overflowing rush of
love, the emotion of the self-existent spiritual ecstasy at its strongest
intensity, and that may extend itself to a fiery and forceful spiritual
enjoyment of things and beings in the world and in the ways of Nature, and yet
this tranquillity and repose would be behind the
surge and in it, always conscious of its depths, always the same. The calm of
the liberated man is not an indolence, incapacity, insensibility, inertia; it
is full of immortal power, capable of all action, attuned to deepest delight,
open to profoundest love and compassion and to every manner of intensest Ananda.
And so too
beyond the inferior light and happiness of that purest quality of Nature, Sattwa, the power that makes for assimilation and
equivalence, right knowledge and right dealing, fine harmony, firm balance,
right law of action, right possession and brings so full a satisfaction to the
mind, beyond this highest thing in the normal nature, admirable in itself so far
as it goes and while it can be maintained, but precarious, secured by
limitation, dependent on rule and condition, there is at its high and distant
source a greater light and bliss free in the free spirit. That is not limited
nor dependent on limitation or rule or condition but self-existent and
unalterable, not the result of this or that harmony amid the discords of our
nature but the fount of harmony and able to create whatever harmony it will.
That is a luminous spiritual and in its native action a direct supramental
force of knowledge, jyotih,
not our modified and derivative mental light, prakāśa. That is the
light and bliss of widest self-existence, spontaneous self-knowledge, intimate
universal identity, deepest self-interchange, not of acquisition, assimilation,
adjustment and laboured equivalence That light is
full of a luminous spiritual will and there is no gulf or disparateness between
its knowledge and its action. That delight is not our paler mental happiness, sukham, a
profound concentrated
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intense self-existent bliss
extended to all that our being does, envisages, creates, a fixed divine but rapture,
Ananda. The liberated soul participates more and more
profoundly in this light. and bliss and grows the more perfectly into it, the
more integrally it unites itself with the Divine. And while among the gunas of the lower Nature there is a necessary disequilibrium,
a shifting inconstancy of measures and a perpetual struggle for domination, the
greater light and bliss, calm, will of kinesis of the Spirit do not exclude
each other, are not at war, are not even merely in equilibrium, but each an
aspect of the two others and in their fullness all are inseparable and one. Our
mind when it approaches the Divine may seem to enter into one to the exclusion
of another, may appear for instance to achieve calm to the exclusion of kinesis
of action, but that is because we approach him first through the selecting
spirit in the mind. Afterwards when we are able to rise above even the
spiritual mind, we can see that each divine power contains all the rest and can
get rid of this initial error.1
We see then that
action is possible without the subjection of the soul to the normal degraded
functioning of the modes of Nature. That functioning depends on the mental,
vital and physical limitation into which we are cast; it is a deformation, an incapacity,
a wrong or depressed value imposed on us by the mind and life in matter. When
we grow into the spirit, this Dharma or inferior law of Nature is replaced by
the immortal dharma of the spirit; there is the experience of a free immortal
action, a divine illimitable knowledge, a transcendent power, an unfathomable
repose. But still there remains the question of the transition; for there must
be a transition, a proceeding by steps, since nothing in God's workings in this
world is done by an abrupt action without procedure or basis. We have the thing
we seek in us, but we have in practice to evolve it out of the inferior forms
of our nature.2
1The account given here of the supreme spiritual and
supramental forms of highest Nature action corresponding to the Gunas is not derived from the Gita, but introduced from
spiritual experience. The Gita does not describe in any detail the action of
the highest Nature, rahasyam
uttamam; it
leaves that for the seeker to discover by his own spiritual experience. It only
points out the nature of the high sattwic temperament
and action through which this supreme mystery has to be reached and insists at
the same time on the overpassing of Sattwa and transcendence of the threeGunas.
2 This is from the point of view of our nature
ascending upwards by self-conquest, effort and discipline. There must also
intervene more and more a descent of the divine Light, Presence and Power into
the being to transform it; otherwise the change at the point of culmination and
beyond it cannot take place. That is why there comes in as the lastmovement the necessity of an absolute self-surrender.
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Therefore in the action of the
modes itself there must be some means, some leverage, some point d'appui,
by which we can effect this transformation. The Gita finds it in the full
development of the sattwic Guna
till that in its potent expansion reaches a point at which it can go beyond
itself and disappear into its source. The reason is evident, because Sattwa is a power of light and happiness, a force that
makes for calm and knowledge, and at its highest point it can arrive at a
certain reflection, almost a mental identity with the spiritual light and bliss
from which it derives. The other two Gunas cannot get
this transformation, Rajas into the divine kinetic will or Tamas
into the divine repose and calm, without the intervention of the sattwic power in Nature. The principle of inertia will
always remain an inert inaction of power or an incapacity of knowledge until
its ignorance disappears in illumination and its torpid incapacity is lost in
the light and force of the omnipotent divine will of repose. Then only can we
have the supreme calm. Therefore Tamas must be
dominated by Sattwa. The principle of rajas for the
same reason must remain always a restless, troubled, feverish or unhappy
working because it has not right knowledge; its native movement is a wrong and
perverse action, perverse through ignorance. Our will must purify itself by
knowledge; it must get more and more to a right and luminously informed action
before it can be converted into the divine kinetic will. That again means the
necessity of the intervention of Sattwa. The sattwic quality is a first mediator between the higher and
the lower nature. It must indeed at a certain point transform or escape from
itself and break up and dissolve into its source; its conditioned derivative
seeking light and carefully constructed action must change into the free direct
dynamics and spontaneous light of the spirit. But meanwhile a high increase of sattwic power delivers us largely from the tamasic and the rajasic
disqualification; and its own disqualification, once we are not pulled too much
downward by Rajas and Tamas, can be surmounted with a
greater ease. To develop sattwa till it becomes full
of spiritual light and calm and happiness is
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.the first condition of this
preparatory discipline of the nature.
That, we shall
find, is the whole intention of the remaining chapters of the Gita. But first
it prefaces the consideration of this enlightening movement by a distinction
between two kinds of being, the Deva and the Asura; for the Deva is capable of
a high self-transforming sattwic action, the Asura incapable. We must see what is the object of this
preface and the precise bearing of this distinction. The general nature of all
human beings is the same, it is a mixture of the three Gunas;
it would seem then that in all there must be the capacity to develop and
strengthen the sattwic element and turn it upward
towards the heights of the divine transformation. That our ordinary turn is
actually towards making our reason and will the servants of our rajasic or tamasic egoism, the
ministers of our restless and ill-balanced kinetic desire or our self-indulgent
indolence and static inertia, can only be, one would imagine, a temporary
characteristic of our undeveloped spiritual being, a rawness of its imperfect
evolution and must disappear when our consciousness rises in the spiritual
scale. But we actually see that men, at least men above a certain level, fall
very largely into two classes, those who have a dominant force of sattwic nature turned towards knowledge, self-control,
beneficence, perfection and those who have a dominant force of rajasic nature turned towards egoistic greatness,
satisfaction of desire, the indulgence of their own strong will and personality
which they seek to impose on the world, not for the service of man or God, but
for their own pride, glory and pleasure. These are the human representatives of
the Devas and Danavas or Asuras, the Gods and the Titans. This distinction is a very
ancient one in Indian religious symbolism. The fundamental idea of the Rig Veda
is a struggle between the Gods and their dark opponents, between the Masters of
Light, sons of Infinity, and the children of Division and Night, a battle in
which man takes part and which is reflected in all his inner life and action.
This was also a fundamental principle of the religion of Zoroaster. The same
idea is prominent in later literature. The Ramayana is in its ethical intention
the parable of an enormous conflict between the Deva in
human form and the incarnate Rakshasa, between the
representative of a high culture and
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Dharma and a huge unbridled force
and gigantic civilisation of the exaggerated Ego. The
Mahabharata, of which the Gita is a section, takes for its subject a lifelong
clash between human Devas and Asuras,
the men of power, sons of the Gods, who are governed by the who are out for the
service of their intellectual, vital and physical ego. The ancient mind, light
of a high ethical Dharma and others who are embodied Titans, the men of power more
open than ours to the truth of things behind the physical veil, saw behind the life
of man great cosmic Powers or beings representative of certain turns or grades
of the universal Shakti, divine, titanic, gigantic, demoniac, and men who
strongly represented in themselves these types of nature were themselves
considered as Devas, Asuras,
Rakshasas, Pisachas. The
Gita for its own purposes takes up this distinction and develops the difference
between these two kinds of beings, dvau bhūtasargau.
It has spoken previously of the nature which is Asuric
and Rakshasic and obstructs God-knowledge, salvation
and perfection; it now contrasts it with the Daivic
nature which is turned to these things.
Arjuna, says the Teacher, is of the Deva
nature. He need not grieve with the thought that by acceptance of battle and slaughter
he will be yielding to the impulses of the Asura. The
action on which all turns, the battle which Arjuna
has to fight with the incarnate Godhead as his charioteer at the bidding of the
Master of the world in the form of the Time-Spirit, is a struggle to establish
the kingdom of the Dharma, the empire of Truth, Right and Justice. He himself
is born in the Deva kind; he has developed in himself
the sattwic being, until he has now come to a point
at which he is capable of a high transformation and liberation from the traigunya and
therefore even from the sattwic nature. The distinction
between the Deva and the Asura
is not comprehensive of all humanity, not rigidly applicable to all its
individuals, neither is it sharp and definite in all stages of the moral or
spiritual history of the race or in all phases of the individual evolution. The
tamasic man who makes so large a part of the whole,
falls into neither category as it is here described, though he may have both
elements in him in a low degree and for the most part serves tepidly the lower qualities.
The normal
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man is ordinarily a mixture; but
one or the other tendency is more pronounced, tends to make him predominantly rajaso-tamasic or sattwo-rajasic
and can be said to be preparing him for either culmination, for the divine clarity
or the titanic turbulence. For here what is in question is a certain
culmination in the evolution of the qualitative nature, as will be evident from
the descriptions given in the text. On one side there can be a sublimation of
the sattwic quality, the culmination or manifestation
of the unborn Deva, on the other a sublimation of the
rajasic turn of the soul in nature, the entire birth
of the Asura. The one leads towards that movement of
liberation on which the Gita is about to lay stress; it makes possible a high
self-exceeding of the sattwa quality and a
transformation into the likeness of the divine being, vimoksaya. The other leads away
from that universal potentiality and precipitates towards an exaggeration of
our bondage to the ego. This is the point of the distinction.
The Deva nature is distinguished by an acme of the sattwic habits and qualities; self-control, sacrifice, the
religious habit, cleanness and purity, candour and
straightforwardness, truth, calm and self-denial, compassion to all beings,
modesty, gentleness, forgivingness, patience, steadfastness, a deep sweet and
serious freedom from all restlessness, levity and inconstancy are its native
attributes. The Asuric qualities, wrath, greed,
cunning, treachery, wilful doing of injury to others,
pride and arrogance and excessive self-esteem have no place in its composition.
But its gentleness and self-denial and self-control are free too from all
weakness: it has energy and soul force, strong resolution, the fearlessness of
the soul that lives in the right and according to the truth as well as its
harmlessness, tejah,
abhayam, dhrtih, ahimsā, satyam. The whole being, the whole
temperament is integrally pure; there is a seeking for knowledge and a calm and
fixed abiding in knowledge. This is the wealth, the plenitude of the man born
into the Deva nature.
The Asuric nature has too its wealth, its plenitude of force,
but it is of a very different, a powerful and evil kind. Asuric
men have no true knowledge of the way of action or the way of abstention, the
fulfilling or the holding in of the nature. Truth is not in them, nor clean
doing, nor faithful observance. They see
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naturally in the world nothing
but a huge play of the satisfaction of self; theirs is a world with Desire for
its cause and seed and governing force and law, a world of Chance, a world
devoid of just relation and linked Karma, a world without God, not true, not
founded in Truth. Whatever better intellectual or higher religious dogma they
may possess, this alone is the true creed of their mind and will in action;
they follow always the cult of Desire and Ego. On that way of seeing life they
lean in reality and by its falsehood they ruin their souls and their reason.
The Asuric man becomes the centre or instrument of a
fierce, Titanic, violent action, a power of destruction in the world, a fount
of injury and evil. Arrogant, full of self-esteem and the drunkenness of their
pride, these misguided souls delude themselves, persist in false and obstinate
aims and pursue the fixed impure resolution of their longings. They imagine
that desire and enjoyment are all the aim of life and in their inordinate and
insatiable pursuit of it they are the prey of a devouring, a measurelessly
unceasing care and thought and endeavour and anxiety
till the moment of their death. Bound by a hundred bonds, devoured by wrath and
lust, unweariedly occupied in amassing unjust gains
which may serve their enjoyment and the satisfaction of their craving, always
they think, “Today I have gained this object of desire, tomorrow I shall have
that other; today I have so much wealth, more I will get tomorrow. I have killed
this my enemy, the rest too I will kill. I am a lord and king of men, I am
perfect, accomplished, strong, happy, fortunate, a privileged enjoyer of the
world; I am wealthy, I am of high birth; who is there like unto me? I will
sacrifice, I will give, I will enjoy.” Thus occupied by many egoistic ideas,
deluded, doing works, but doing them wrongly, acting mightily, but for
themselves, for desire, for enjoyment, not for God in themselves and God in man,
they fall into the unclean hell of their own evil. They sacrifice and give, but
from a self-regarding ostentation, from vanity and with a stiff and foolish
pride. In the egoism of their strength and power, in the violence of their wrath
and arrogance they hate, despise and belittle the God hidden in themselves and
the God in man. And because they have this proud hatred and contempt of good and
of God, because they are cruel and evil, the Divine casts them down continually
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into more and more Asuric births. Not seeking him,
they find him not, and at last, losing the way to him altogether, sink down
into the lowest status of soul-nature, adhamām gatim.
This graphic description, even
giving its entire value to the distinction it implies, must not be pressed to carry more in it than it means. When it is
said that there are two creations of beings in this material world, Deva and Asura,1 it is not meant that human
souls are so created by God from the beginning each with its own inevitable
career in Nature, nor is it meant that there is a rigid spiritual
predestination and those rejected from the beginning by the Divine are blinded
by him so that they may be thrust down to eternal perdition and the impurity of
Hell. All souls are eternal portions of the Divine, the Asura
as well as the Deva, all can come to salvation: even
the greatest sinner can turn to the Divine. But the evolution of the soul in
Nature is an adventure of which Swabhava and the
Karma governed by the swabhava are ever the chief
powers; and if an excess in the manifestation of the swabhava,
the self-becoming of the soul, a disorder in its play turns the law of being to
the perverse side, if the rajasic qualities are given
the upper hand, cultured to the diminution of sattwa,
then the trend of Karma and its results necessarily culminate not in the sattwic height which is capable of the movement of
liberation, but in the highest exaggeration of the perversities of the lower
nature. The man, if he does not stop short and abandon his way of error, has eventually the Asura
full-born in him, and once he has taken that enormous turn away from the Light
and Truth, he can no more reverse the fatal speed of his course because of the
very immensity of the misused divine power in him until he has plumbed the
depths to which it falls, found bottom and seen where the way has led him, the
power exhausted and misspent, himself down in the lowest state of the soul
nature, which is Hell. Only when he understands and turns to the Light, does
that other truth of the Gita come in, that even the greatest
1The distinction between the two creations has its
full truth in supraphysical planes where the law of
spiritual evolution does not govern the movement. There are worlds of the Devas, worlds of the Asuras, and
there are in these worlds behind us constant types of beings which support the
complex divine play of creation indispensable to the march of the universe and
cast their influence also on the earth and on the life and nature of man in
this physical plane of existence.
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sinner, the most impure and
violent evil-doer is saved the moment he turns to adore and follow after the
Godhead within him. Then, simply by that turn, he gets very soon into the sattwic way which leads to perfection and freedom.
The Asuric Prakriti is the rajasic at its height; it leads to the slavery of the soul
in Nature, to desire, wrath and greed, the three powers of the rajasic ego, and these are the threefold doors of Hell, the
Hell into which the natural being falls when it indulges the impurity and evil
and error of its lower or perverted instincts. These three are again the thedoors of a great darkness, they fold back into Tamas, the characteristic power of the original Ignorance;
for the unbridled force of the rajasic nature, when
exhausted, falls back into the weakness, collapse, darkness, incapacity of the
worst tamasic soul-status. To escape from this
downfall one must get rid of these three evil forces and turn to the light of
the sattwic quality, live by the right, in the true
relations, according to the Truth and the Law; then one follows one's own
higher good and arrives at the highest soul-status. To follow the law of desire
is not the true rule of our nature; there is a higher and juster
standard of its works. But where is it embodied or how is it to be found? In
the first place, discovered is embodied in its Shastra,
its rule of science and knowledge, rule of ethics, rule of religion, rule of
best social living, rule of one's right relations with man and God the human
race has always been seeking for this just and high Law and whatever it has and
Nature. Shastra does not mean a mass of customs, some
good, some bad, unintelligently followed by the customary routine mind of the tamasic man. Shastra is the
knowledge and teaching laid down by intuition, experience and wisdom, the science
and art and ethic of life, the best standards available to the race. The
half-awakened man who leaves the observance of its rule to follow the guidance
of his instincts and desires, can get pleasure but not happiness; for the inner
happiness can only come by right living. He cannot move to perfection, cannot
acquire the highest spiritual status. The law of instinct and desire seems to
come first in the animal world, but the manhood of man grows by pursuit of
truth and religion and knowledge and a right life. The Shastra,
the recognised Right that he has set up
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to govern his lower members by
his reason and intelligent will, must therefore first be observed and made the
authority for conduct and works and for what should or should not be done, till
the instinctive desire nature is schooled and abated and put down by the habit
of self-control and man is ready first for a freer intelligent self-guidance
and then for the highest supreme law and supreme liberty of the spiritual
nature.
For the Shastra in its ordinary aspect is not that spiritual law,
although at its loftiest point, when it becomes a science and art of spiritual
living, Adhyatma-shastra,—the Gita itself describes
its own teaching as the highest and most secret Shastra,—it
formulates a rule of the self-transcendence of the sattwic
nature and develops the discipline which leads to spiritual transmutation. Yet
all Shastra is built on a number of preparatory
conditions, dharmas; it is a means, not an end. The
supreme end is the freedom of the spirit when abandoning all dharmas the soul turns to God for its sole law of action, acts
straight from the divine will and lives in the freedom
of the divine nature, not in the Law, but in the Spirit. This is the
development of the teaching which is prepared by the next question of Arjuna.
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