The Doer and the Instrument

VII

निमित्तमात्रं भव सव्यसाचिन्

nimittamātraṃ bhava savyasācin

The sattwic doer becomes the Jiva in contact with his source, united with the Purushottama; he is no longer the personal doer of the act, but a spiritual channel of the works of the transcendent and universal Spirit. His natural being transformed and illumined remains to be the instrument of a universal and impersonal action, the bow of the divine Archer.

There is a moment near the opening of the Gita that holds the whole problem of human action in a single gesture. Arjuna, the first archer of his age, the Savyasachin who can draw the bow with either hand, has cast down the divine bow and the inexhaustible quiver given him for that tremendous hour, has sunk upon the seat of his chariot, and has said to his charioteer, with the finality of one who believes the decision rests with him alone, na yotsya, “I will not fight” (2·9). All that he spoke before this — the kinsmen he would slay, the sin he would incur, the ancient law of the family he would bring to ruin — was spoken in the first person; and this last refusal, which seems to him a renunciation, is only the same first person turned the other way. Whether it cries “I will do” or “I will not do”, it is one voice, the voice of the doer who takes himself for the author of his deeds and the owner of their consequence.

And Hrishikesha, we are told, answered him “smiling as it were” between the two armies (2·10). That smile is the first word of the teaching before any word has been spoken. It is the smile of One who knows that the burden Arjuna is so tragically shouldering was never his to carry, that the real Doer of this vast action sits beside him holding the reins, and that the anguish of the human ego, sincere as it is, rests upon an error of identity which can be dissolved. The whole Gita, seen from this side, is the patient undoing of that error, not by making Arjuna less active, but by removing the centre from which his action springs, until the man who said “I will not fight” can say at the close, his delusion destroyed and his memory regained, kariṣye vacanaṃ tava, “I will act according to Thy word” (18·73). Between these two sayings lies the whole passage from the ego-doer to the divine instrument.

ahaṃkāra

The Knot of the I

The Gita names the error with a precision that leaves the ego no refuge. It does not say that our actions are evil, nor that action itself is a bondage to be fled; it says that we are mistaken about who is acting.

प्रकृतेः क्रियमाणानि गुणैः कर्माणि सर्वशः ।अहंकारविमूढात्मा कर्ताहमिति मन्यते ॥

prakṛteḥ kriyamāṇāni guṇaiḥ karmāṇi sarvaśaḥahaṃkāravimūḍhātmā kartāhamiti manyate

The word is ahaṃkāravimūḍhātmā, the self bewildered by the I-sense, and the bewilderment is exact: it is not that there is no action, nor even that there is no one behind it, but that a false claimant has stepped into the place of the true. Nature, prakṛti, the executive Power, is working out through her modes the whole movement of mind and life and body; and somewhere in that movement a point of self-reference forms, gathers the stream of workings about itself, and says, “It is I who do this.” Sri Aurobindo calls the ego, in a phrase that is at once severe and liberating, “a mere mental knot and point of reference for the play of the natural workings.” It is not a being but a knot; and what is knotted can be untied.

It is really the ego which is subject to Nature, inevitably, because it is itself part of Nature, one functioning of her machinery; but when the self-awareness in the mind-consciousness identifies itself with the ego, it creates the appearance of a lower self, an ego-self.

From this follows the Gita’s strange and luminous psychology of two selves in us: the apparent soul, the desire-soul, which changes with every shift of the modes and is wholly shaped by them, and the true Purusha, the Person behind, who is not limited by Nature though he upholds her and is figured in her. The one who says “I am doing” is the first; the one who truly is, is the second. And the Gita at once turns this knowledge into a way of living. The knower of the true principles of the modes and of works, tattvavit, sees that it is the modes which are acting and reacting on one another, guṇā guṇeṣu vartante, and “is not caught in them by attachment” (3·28). He does not cease to act, for none stands even for a moment not doing work (3·5); he ceases only to be caught. The action continues; what falls away is the knot.

mithyā vyavasāya

The Refusal That Is Also a Doing

Here the Gita meets a subtle danger, and it is Arjuna’s own. If the ego is not the doer, then surely the wise course is to do nothing, to withdraw the will from a movement that is not ours and let the whole troubled play of Nature sink into rest. It is the very reasoning by which Arjuna had cast down his bow; and it is the one conclusion the Teacher will not allow. For the refusal to act is not an escape from the modes of Nature; it is one of them. Arjuna’s recoil, which dressed itself in the noble language of pity and of dharma, was judged at once for what it was at the root, a “small and false pity”, a weakness of the heart that had borrowed the voice of conscience. The ego that says “I will not” is no less the ego than the one that says “I will”, and no less the servant of Nature; for, as Sri Aurobindo observes, “even our passivity, our refusal to will, is itself a choice, itself an act of the will of Nature in us.”

So when Krishna returns at the end to the refusal with which the dialogue began, he speaks of it not as a sin but as an illusion.

यदहङ्कारमाश्रित्य न योत्स्य इति मन्यसे ।मिथ्यैष व्यवसायस्ते प्रकृतिस्त्वां नियोक्ष्यति ॥

yadahaṅkāramāśritya na yotsya iti manyasemithyaiṣa vyavasāyaste prakṛtistvāṃ niyokṣyati

“Thy nature shall appoint thee to thy work.” It is not a threat but a revelation of fact. The warrior-soul in Arjuna, his svabhāva, the law of his own becoming, will drive him to the battle whatever his mind resolves, and what from delusion he desires not to do, that he shall do even helplessly (18·60). His “I will not” is as little free as any other movement of the ego; it is a surface decision floating on a deep current it does not govern. The Gita therefore closes the door upon two false roads at once. It will not let the ego keep its claim to be the doer; and it will not let the ego, deprived of that claim, fall back into the tamasic inaction which is only its darker form. Sri Aurobindo is emphatic that such a withdrawal would be “not therefore a liberation, but rather a subjection to the lowest of the three gunas.” Something else must be found, a third way which is neither the ego’s action nor the ego’s abstention: an action whose source is no longer the ego at all.

kṛtsnavit

The Shadow of a Truth

How then are we to think of the sense of free agency which is so vivid in us, so necessary, it would seem, to all moral effort? The Gita, as Sri Aurobindo reads it, answers from two heights at once. From the height of the whole-knower, the kṛtsnavit, what we call free will is “an unreal eidolon of liberty”, a contorted reflection of two opposite truths, the soul’s absolute freedom at one pole of our being and Nature’s absolute determinism at the other; for “the Gita regards nothing as freedom which is not a complete liberation and mastery.” Our choosing is in far the greater part the choosing of our past, our heredity, our formation, the whole accumulated action of Nature converging upon the moment and calling itself “I”.

And yet this is not the end of his reading, and it is here that the Gita’s severity turns to compassion. The ego’s sense of agency, he writes, is not a sheer delusion but “an error of standpoint and an error of placement.” The ego is not wrong in feeling that there is someone within us who is the true centre of all this action and for whom it exists; it is wrong only in taking that someone to be itself.

The self-assertion of ego-sense is the broken and distorted shadow in our minds of the truth that there is a real Self within us which is the master of all and for whom and at whose behest Nature goes about her works.

This changes the whole character of the discipline. The ego is not to be despised, beaten down, or crushed out of existence by a violence of the will; it is to be traced back to its original, as a shadow is traced back to the form that casts it. The sense of “I act” is the dim presentiment in the natural being of the Lord who acts through all, and of the Jiva, the eternal individual, who is his portion. The Gita describes that Presence in the body as witness, source of the consent, upholder of Nature’s work, her enjoyer, almighty Lord and supreme Self (13·23). He who looks on the pure Self as the petty doer of this or that, it says elsewhere, “seeth not” (18·16); but he who sees that all action is done by Prakriti and that the Self is the inactive witness, “he sees” (13·30). To see truly is already to begin to be free.

akartā

The Witness and Its Silence

The first great release, then, comes by stepping back. The soul withdraws from its identification with the workings of Nature into the silent Self behind, the akṣara, the Immutable, which is not the doer of works nor the joiner of works to their fruits, but only observes the natural movement proceeding by its own law. The Gita gives this state its most memorable image in the fifth chapter: the man whose mind is in Yoga with the inactive Impersonal thinks, “I am doing nothing”; when he sees, hears, tastes, eats, moves, sleeps, breathes, speaks, opens his eyes or closes them, he holds that it is only the senses acting upon the objects of the senses, naiva kiṃcit karomi (5·8–9). He has abandoned attachment to the fruits of works, is ever satisfied without dependence, and “he does nothing though (through his nature) he engages in action” (4·20).

This is a real liberation, and no one who has tasted it will speak lightly of it. The fever passes out of action; the long anxious clutching at results relaxes; a wide calm opens behind all the movements of the day like the sky behind moving clouds. And yet Sri Aurobindo, having set this state before us in its full dignity, asks at once whether it can be the end.

Is this the last state, the utmost possibility, the highest secret? It cannot be, since this is a mixed or divided, not a perfectly harmonised status, a double, not a unified being, a freedom in the soul, an imperfection in the Nature. It can only be a stage.

A soul free in its silence and a nature still working in ignorance are not yet one being. The Sankhya answers the division by letting the Purusha withdraw his sanction altogether, so that Nature’s play falls still and action ceases; and the ascetic answers it by rejecting the world. But the Gita will not make the witness the summit, because the Divine it knows is not a witness only. The silence has been won; it must now be joined to a greater Power which acts from within the silence and is not diminished by acting.

kartāram akartāram

The Doer Who Does Not Do

That Power the Gita discloses first in Krishna himself. “The fourfold order was created by Me according to the divisions of quality and active function,” he says; “know Me for the doer of this (the fourfold law of human workings) who am yet the imperishable non-doer. Works fix not themselves on Me, nor have I desire for the fruits of action” (4·13–14). Here is the whole secret of divine works in a single breath: kartāram api akartāram, the doer who is non-doer. The Divine is not the Sankhya’s inactive witness, looking on at a play he has not made; nor is he a doer as the ego is a doer, bound by the works he sets in motion and hungry for their outcome. He is both at once, and neither in the limited sense.

But neither is he the inactive, impassive, unpuissant Witness and nothing else; for it is he who works in the steps and measures of his power; every movement of it, every particle of the world of beings it forms is instinct with his presence, full of his consciousness, impelled by his will, shaped by his knowledge.

This is the pattern set before the human worker. The liberation of the witness is to be kept, for without it action can never be free; but upon that silent base there is to rise a will that is no longer ours in the egoistic sense, a will moving in the steps of the Divine’s own working. Hence the paradox of the fourth chapter, which is not a riddle of words but a precise description of the liberated state: he who in action can see inaction, and can see action still continuing in the cessation of works, “is in Yoga and a many-sided universal worker” (4·18). The inner stillness and the outer energy are no longer opposites. The same soul is at rest in the Immutable and active in the world, as the Lord is at rest in his eternity and active in all his creation; and “he who thus knoweth Me,” the Teacher adds, “is not bound by works” (4·14). The knowing is itself the freedom: to know how God acts is to begin to act as God acts.

mayi saṃnyasya

Given Up to Me

How does the human soul pass from the silence of the witness into this divine manner of action? The Gita’s answer is given early, as a seed, and unfolds through all its chapters to the last.

मयि सर्वाणि कर्माणि संन्यस्याध्यात्मचेतसा ।निराशीर्निर्ममो भूत्वा युध्यस्व विगतज्वरः ॥

mayi sarvāṇi karmāṇi saṃnyasyādhyātmacetasānirāśīrnirmamo bhūtvā yudhyasva vigatajvaraḥ

Everything is contained in the first words, mayi sarvāṇi karmāṇi saṃnyasya, “giving up thy works to Me.” The ego’s claim is not merely dropped into a void; it is given to Someone. Sri Aurobindo traces the steps with great care. “The reposing of works in the Impersonal is a means of getting rid of the personal egoism of the doer, but the end is to give up all our actions to that great Lord of all.” The silence of the Self empties the claimant; the surrender to the Lord gives the emptied nature a Master. And the Gita returns to the injunction at the end in its fullest form, as a turning of the whole consciousness: giving up in thy conscious mind all thy actions into Me, be always one in heart and consciousness with Me (18·57).

But the ego is a subtle guest, and it will survive even into the house of devotion if it is allowed. There is a doership of the pious and the good which is harder to see than any other, because it clothes itself in the Divine’s own name.

There must be a complete renunciation of all desire and of all self-regarding egoistic choice and impulse and finally of that much subtler egoism of the will which either says, “The work is mine, I am the doer”, or even “The work is God’s, but I am the doer.”

“The work is God’s, but I am the doer”: the ego that has consented to serve still keeps its hold upon the doing, as a steward who has acknowledged his master may yet rule the household in his own way. The true saṃnyāsa, therefore, is not the outward renunciation of works, nor even the offering of their fruits, though that offering must come first, but the surrender of the doing itself. “The spiritual transference of all our works to the Master and his Shakti is the real Sannyasa in the teaching of the Gita.” Then only does the fever of the soul, jvara, pass away, and one can fight, as the verse says, “delivered from the fever of thy soul.”

nimittamātra

The Occasion Only

In the eleventh chapter the teaching that has been given as knowledge is given as vision. Arjuna, who had shrunk from the slaying of his kinsmen as though their fate hung upon his arm, sees the Godhead as Time, the destroyer arisen for the destruction of the nations, and hears from that terrible mouth the words that end his illusion of sole authorship: “Even without thee all these warriors shall be not” (11·32). The will that is working itself out upon the field of Kurukshetra is not Arjuna’s will, nor could his abstention prevent it; it is the will of the One in whose eternal vision all is already done. And then the command follows.

तस्मात्त्वमुत्तिष्ठ यशो लभस्वजित्वा शत्रून् भुङ्क्ष्व राज्यं समृद्धम् ।मयैवैते निहताः पूर्वमेवनिमित्तमात्रं भव सव्यसाचिन् ॥

tasmāttvamuttiṣṭha yaśo labhasvajitvā śatrūn bhuṅkṣva rājyaṃ samṛddhammayaivaite nihatāḥ pūrvamevanimittamātraṃ bhava savyasācin

Nimittamātraṃ bhava: become the occasion only, the instrument. It would be easy to hear this as a word of fatalism, as though the human being were a puppet whose strings are pulled by an inscrutable hand. It is the very opposite. The instrument the Gita asks for is not blind but seeing; it has beheld the whole movement and consents to it; it acts not from compulsion but from a knowledge that has become one with the Will it serves.

The highest way appointed for him is to carry out the will of God without egoism, as the human occasion and instrument of that which he sees to be decreed, with the constant supporting memory of the Godhead in himself and man … and in whatever ways are appointed for him by the Lord of his Nature.

Even the fruit returns, but transformed. “Get thee glory, conquer thy enemies and enjoy an opulent kingdom”: the promise is made, Sri Aurobindo notes, “not as a fruit hungered for by the individual,” but as “the glory given by the Divine to himself in his Vibhuti.” And the name by which Krishna calls Arjuna in this moment is itself a figure of the instrument: Savyasachin, the archer whose left hand is as skilled as his right, wholly available to the purpose of the bow. The last word of the vision is not terror but reassurance; the divine worker, not appalled by the face of the Destroyer, will see “behind it the face of the Charioteer, the Leader of man, the Friend of all creatures.” The One who commands the instrument is the Friend who has driven his chariot from the beginning.

hṛddeśa

The Lord in the Heart

At the very close the hidden structure of all action is uncovered without veil. “The Lord, O Arjuna, is seated in the heart of all beings turning all beings mounted upon a machine by his Maya” (18·61). To the ignorant this is the most crushing of sayings, the final proof that we are driven; to the soul that has followed the Gita’s long way it is the most intimate. For the One who turns the wheel of the natural being is not a stranger, not a blind force, not a distant Law; he is seated in the heart. The Doer whom the ego has so long counterfeited has been there all the while, nearer to us than our own sense of “I”. And the counsel that follows is not submission but refuge: “In him take refuge in every way of thy being and by his grace thou shalt come to the supreme peace and the eternal status” (18·62).

The greatest Yoga is to take refuge from all the perplexities and difficulties of our nature with this indwelling Lord of all Nature, to turn to him with our whole being, with the life and body and sense and mind and heart and understanding, with our whole dedicated knowledge and will and action … in every way of our conscious self and our instrumental nature.

Nor is the individual lost in this surrender. What disappears is the ego, the knot, the false claimant; what appears is the true person whom the ego was shadowing. “In place of the ego there comes forward conscious and manifest the true spiritual individual in the freedom of his real nature.” He is the Jiva, the eternal portion of the Divine who has become the living being in the world (15·7), and his individuality, far from being abolished, is for the first time real, for it now draws its life from its source. Therefore the last word can be spoken: “Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone. I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve” (18·66). The ego-doer carried the whole weight of the world and could not bear it; the instrument carries nothing, and through it the Divine can bear all.

From the ego-doer to the divine instrument

Only in this light does the smile of Hrishikesha at the beginning show its full meaning. The Divine does not mock the anguish of the human doer; he smiles because he sees, beyond it, the delight of which the anguish is the shadow. For the instrument is not a slave. It is the beloved’s own hand in the work of the Lover, a portion of the Divine delighting in the play of the Divine; and the freedom it finds is not the thin liberty of the ego’s choice but the joy of the bow in the Archer’s grasp, of the flute in the player’s breath. When we are freed by knowledge, Sri Aurobindo writes, the Lord, manifest as our supreme self, “takes up our works and uses us as faultless instruments” for the helping of the world. Nothing of our energy is lost in that giving; everything is gained, for the power that acts is no longer a knot of desire straining against the current of the world, but the current’s own Source moving freely through a nature that has ceased to resist.

Arjuna’s last words in the Gita answer his first. He had said, “I will not fight,” and fallen silent. He says now, “Destroyed is my delusion, I have regained memory through Thy grace, O Infallible One, I am firm, dispelled are my doubts, I will act according to Thy word” (18·73). The same man, the same bow, the same field, the same terrible work; but the centre has moved. He does not say “I will not”, nor even “I will”; he says “Thy word”. That is the whole change, and it is the change the Gita asks of every one who reads it: not less action but a different Doer, not the loss of the self but its recovery, not the silencing of the human instrument but its tuning to the one Will that is free.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 2

1. 9
2. 10

Chapter 3

1. 27
2. 28
3. 30

Chapter 4

1. 13
2. 14
3. 18

Chapter 5

1. 8

Chapter 13

1. 30

Chapter 11

1. 32
2. 33

Chapter 18

1. 57
2. 59
3. 60
4. 61
5. 62
6. 66
7. 73

• The Determinism of Nature
• Beyond the Modes of Nature
• The Principle of Divine Works
• The Divine Worker
• The Gunas, Mind and Works
• The Vision of the World Spirit; Time and Destroyer
• Towards the Supreme Secret
• The Supreme Secret
• Swabhava and Swadharma
• Equality