भक्तियोगः
bhaktiyogaḥ
Repose all thy mind in the Beloved and lodge thy understanding in him, and swiftly he will lift thee out of the sea of death into the secure bosom of the Eternal.
- viśvarūpa — the All-Form seen, too vast yet for the unready heart
- madbhaktaḥ sa me priyaḥ — the lover, equal to all, who is dear to God
After the thunder of the World-Spirit comes a quiet question, the question of a soul that has seen too much to return to its old notions and not yet enough to rest in the new. “Those devotees who thus by a constant union seek after thee, and those who seek after the unmanifest Immutable, which of these have the greater knowledge of Yoga?” (12·1). Sri Aurobindo marks here a pointed return to the difference between the current Vedantic way, which led through an austere and exclusive knowledge to a silent Absolute, and the larger freedom that the Gita opens to the spirit.
The answer is decisive. Those who found their mind in the Divine and seek him with a supreme faith are the most perfectly in union (12·2). Those who seek the indefinable Immutable arrive also (12·3–4), but by a harder road, for the unmanifest is reached by embodied souls only through “a stern difficulty and anguish of the nature” (12·5). The easier way, Sri Aurobindo insists, is not the lesser. The Divine whom the Gita’s bhakta adores is at once Parabrahman and the living Soul of all things; and the liberation to which he leads is not the absorption of the soul alone but all kinds of union at once, identity and indwelling, nearness and likeness of nature, fused into one richest freedom. To those who give all their actions to him, the Lord promises, “speedily I deliver them out of the sea of death-bound existence” (12·6–7).
And when too in the high passion of love the devotee of the Lover and Friend of man and of all creatures casts upon him all his heart of consciousness and yearning of delight, then swiftly the Supreme comes to him as the saviour and deliverer and exalts him by a happy embrace of his mind and heart and body out of the waves of the sea of death in this mortal nature into the secure bosom of the Eternal.
Then comes the chapter’s compassion, a ladder let down to every capacity. “On Me repose all thy mind and lodge all thy understanding in Me” (12·8); if the consciousness cannot yet be held there steadily, then seek by the Yoga of practice (12·9); if even that is too hard, do all works for his sake (12·10); and if the mind still forgets, then renounce the fruit of action with the self controlled (12·11). Sri Aurobindo does not hide the difficulty of the way, its “nights of long exile from the Light,” its hours of revolt and doubt; but he shows how the Gita’s scale of potencies ends in the giving up of the fruit, because on that renunciation follows peace (12·12), and calm and peace are the soil from which knowledge, will and devotion can lift their pinnacles into the ether of Eternity.
The second half of the chapter draws, verse after verse, the face of the one who is dear to God. He has no I-ness and my-ness, friendship and pity for all beings and hate for none (12·13–14); by him the world is not troubled, nor is he troubled by the world (12·15); he neither rejoices at the pleasant nor sorrows at the unpleasant, for his devotion receives all things as good from the hands of his eternal Lover and Master (12·17); he is equal to friend and enemy, to honour and insult (12·18–19). These are not ornaments hung upon piety. They are the old first demand of the Gita, equality and desirelessness, returning now as the natural form of love.
And the crown of this equality is love founded on knowledge, fulfilled in instrumental action, extended to all things and beings, a vast absorbing and all-containing love for the divine Self who is Creator and Master of the universe.
“Exceedingly dear to Me,” the chapter ends, are those who make the Purushottama their one supreme aim and follow the immortalising Dharma of this teaching (12·20). With these words the middle movement of the Gita is sealed: works have found their soul in love, and knowledge its heart. Yet Sri Aurobindo notes that the rest of the Gita is written to throw a fuller light on this immortal Dharma. The lover dear to God must now come to know the field in which he loves, the Nature through which his devotion must act, and the Knower who dwells in it.
Essays on the Gita
Key verses
