अक्षरब्रह्मयोगः
akṣarabrahmayogaḥ
Remember Him at all times and fight, until remembrance is no longer an act of the mind but the very substance of your consciousness.
- vāsudevaḥ sarvam — the knowledge that the Divine is all that is
- mām anusmara yudhya ca — the whole of life become a remembrance of the Divine
The seventh chapter ended by naming the great principles of existence; the eighth begins with Arjuna asking what they are. What is that Brahman, what the self-principle, what karma; what is the domain of beings, what the divine, and what the Lord of sacrifice here in this body; and how, at the moment of departure, is the Divine to be known (8·1–2)? The answers are brief. The Akshara, the Imperishable, is the supreme Brahman; svabhāva is the self-principle; karma is the creative movement that brings beings into existence (8·3); the domain of beings is the mutable becoming, the divine is the Purusha, and “I myself am the Lord of sacrifice, here in the body” (8·4). The Gita will return upon these terms; but already they show that the silent Self, the moving world, the cosmic Spirit and the sacrifice of works are not separate things, but aspects of one Being.
He is not only remote from us in some supreme status beyond, but he is here too in the body of every being, in the heart of man and in Nature.
Then the teaching turns towards death. Whoever leaves his body remembering Me at his time of end comes to my status of being (8·5), for whatever becoming the mind is fixed upon at the time of death, to that it goes. Sri Aurobindo refuses to let this be read as a death-bed device or a cheap indulgence of popular religion. The soul creates its future by the power of its consciousness, and the last thought is not an accident; it is the sum of what the whole life has been, and the passage can be made towards the Supreme only by one whose life has already been turned towards him.
If birth is a becoming, death also is a becoming, not by any means a cessation.
Hence the central word of the chapter, and one of the central words of the Gita: therefore at all times remember Me and fight (8·7). Remembrance and battle are not set one against the other, as if the soul must either contemplate or act. The command is to act in remembrance, holding the Eternal in thought through all the tumult of the hour. The Yogin who continually remembers the Divine, thinking of nothing else, finds him easy to attain (8·14); and the great souls who come to him come not again to this transient and painful birth (8·15).
The remembrance of the Divine Being becomes no longer an intermittent act of the mind, but the natural condition of our activities and in a way the very substance of the consciousness.
The vision then widens to the scale of the cosmos. The highest heavens of the cosmic plan are subject to return, but there is no rebirth imposed on the soul that comes to the Divine (8·16). Worlds go forth in the Day of Brahma and are drawn back in his Night; yet beyond this cosmic unmanifest there is another, a supracosmic unmanifest, eternal, which does not perish when all beings perish (8·20), the supreme place of being from which there is no return (8·21). And this highest, the chapter says with a quiet emphasis, is won by a bhakti which turns to him alone, in whom all beings exist and by whom all this world is extended (8·22). The two paths of the departing soul are named, the bright and the dark (8·24–25), but the Yogin who knows them is not bewildered, and he passes beyond all the merit of Veda and sacrifice and austerity to the supreme status (8·28).
So the soul is left holding two things together which the mind would keep apart: the Imperishable beyond all worlds, and the battle of this one. It has learned that to remember the Supreme is not to leave the field, and that the whole of life may become one continuous turning to him. It is ready now to hear the most secret word, the knowledge that makes this remembrance natural and easy.
Essays on the Gita
Key verses
