Self, Nature and the Lord

IX

उत्तमः पुरुषस्त्वन्यः परमात्मेत्युदाहृतः

uttamaḥ puruṣastvanyaḥ paramātmetyudāhṛtaḥ

The Gita is not a treatise of metaphysical philosophy, in spite of the great mass of metaphysical ideas which arise incidentally in its pages; for here no metaphysical truth is brought into expression solely for its own sake. It seeks the highest truth for the highest practical utility, not for intellectual or even for spiritual satisfaction, but as the truth that saves and opens to us the passage from our present mortal imperfection to an immortal perfection.

There comes a moment on the field of Kurukshetra when counsel is no longer enough. The bow has slipped from Arjuna’s hand, his reason has turned against itself, and every standard by which a noble man has been taught to act, duty and kinship, the law of the warrior and the fear of sin, speaks at once and speaks contrarily. To such a mind it is useless to say only, “Do this,” for it no longer knows who it is that would do, or what the doing is, or into what the slain depart. And so the Teacher, who answered that despair first by smiling as it were between the two armies (2·10), begins to speak of the soul and of Nature and of Himself; not because the hour of battle is an hour for philosophy, but because action has become unintelligible and can be made whole again only from its roots.

What follows through eighteen chapters is not a system laid out for the pleasure of its symmetry. It is an architecture raised stone by stone, each stone set exactly where the building would otherwise fall: the immutable Self where grief threatened to overwhelm, the witnessing Purusha where the ego claimed to be the doer, the higher Nature where the will to act seemed condemned to remain the will of the modes, the eternal portion where individuality seemed fated to vanish in the Impersonal, the Lord in the heart where the works of the freed soul needed a Master to receive them, and at the summit the Purushottama, in whom all these truths, which to the dividing mind contradict one another, are found to be the faces of a single Person. To follow the Gita’s metaphysics in this way is to watch a soul being rebuilt from within; and at every step the question is the same, the practical question of the warrior at the chariot’s edge: how then shall I act?

samagraṃ mām

The Reason at War with Itself

We think of metaphysics as the luxury of a settled mind. The Gita reverses this relation. Its great statements about the Self and Nature and God arise because a practical crisis has driven the reason to the end of its resources. Arjuna’s cry in 2·7 is not the cry of a doubter who wishes to be entertained with a doctrine, but of a man whose whole conscious being is bewildered and who can find nowhere any valid law of action. When he complains a little later that he has been given “a confused and mingled speech” (3·2), he asks for one clear word by which to walk; and the Teacher’s answer is to give him not less truth but more, until the apparent contradictions dissolve into a vision large enough to contain them.

There is a peculiar difficulty in this method, and the Gita does not hide it. The highest spiritual truth can be lived and seen, but it can be only partially stated; the Upanishads, speaking out of vision, used image and symbol and let their words roll out into an illimitable wave of suggestion. The Gita cannot take that way, because it has to meet an intelligence that is at war with itself and must be satisfied on its own ground.

The reason has to be led to a truth beyond itself, but by its own means and in its own manner. Offered a spiritually psychological solution, of the data of which it has no experience, it can only be assured of its validity if it is satisfied by an intellectual statement of the truths of being upon which the solution rests.

This is why the metaphysics of the Gita is built by stages, and why each stage is proportioned to a need. It gives first what the disciple can already receive, the familiar truths of the Sankhya and the Vedanta, the Self that does not die and the Nature that does all works; and only afterwards, when these have done their liberating work and disclosed their own insufficiency, does it reveal the larger truths that were implied from the beginning. In the seventh chapter the Teacher announces the change of level: by a Yoga founded in him, the disciple shall know him “without any remainder of doubt, integrally” (7·1), samagraṃ mām, so that “there shall be no other thing here left to be known” (7·2). That word samagra, entire, is the key to the whole architecture. The Gita will not suffer any single truth of the spirit, however high, to stand as the whole truth, because a partial truth made absolute always issues in a partial life. The knowledge that sees only the silent Self issues in withdrawal; the knowledge that sees only Nature issues in bondage to her mechanism; the devotion that sees only a personal God, without the Self and without the world, issues in a love intense but narrow. Only an integral knowledge can found an integral action.

The Gita’s metaphysics is thus less a doctrine about God than a record of the successive footholds by which a human soul, fallen into bewilderment on the field of its own dharma, climbs back into the light, and finds that the light was the charioteer beside it all the while.

akṣara puruṣa

The Silent Witness

The first necessity is grief, and grief rests upon an error about death. Arjuna sorrows because he takes the fall of bodies for the destruction of beings; and so the first truth the Teacher lays down is the truth of the Self that is unborn and undying, “not slain with the slaying of the body” (2·20). This is not a consolation offered to a mourner. It removes the ground of the mourning; it shifts the centre of the disciple’s consciousness from the perishable form to that which inhabits it and is not touched by its perishing.

But the Self discloses itself more fully as the teaching proceeds, and with it a second deliverance. Behind the ego, which claims every movement of mind and body as its own, there stands a Purusha that does not act. Nature, Prakriti, with her three modes, performs all works, and “he whose self is bewildered by egoism thinks that it is his ‘I’ which is doing them” (3·27); he who sees that all action is done by Prakriti and that the Self is the inactive witness, he sees (13·30). Here is the Akshara, the immutable in the mutable, the immobile in the mobile, the imperishable in things perishable, silent, equal, impartial to all happenings, containing the whole drama of Nature as an unmoved spectator contains the play before his eyes. To enter into it is to be delivered at once from the fever of personal claim; works reposed upon this Brahman no more cling to the soul than water clings to the lotus leaf (5·10).

To draw back from the ego and the troubled personality into this calm, equal, eternal, universal, impersonal Self is the first step towards a seeing action in Yoga done in conscious union with the divine Being and the infallible Will that, however obscure now to us, manifests itself in the universe.

Mark the words, the first step. The Gita never lets us forget that this great deliverance is a beginning and not an end. Its necessity is plain. Without the impersonal Self the soul cannot be free from grief and ego, and all its action, however noble its aims, remains the action of the troubled personality, the puppet of the modes who imagines himself their master. Equality, samatā, the foundation of the whole Yoga of works, is nothing else than this Self lived in the midst of action. And yet, taken by itself, the Akshara offers no reason for action at all. Of itself it does nothing and determines nothing; it supports all things equally and prefers none. If this were the last word, the sage who had found it would have every reason to lay down his bow, and the ancient ideal of a complete cessation from works would stand justified. The very truth that frees Arjuna from his grief threatens to confirm him in his refusal.

kṣara puruṣa

The Soul in the Moving World

Over against the silent Self stands the other term of the Gita’s first dualism, the soul involved in Nature, the Kshara: “the mutable is all these existences” (15·16). It is the spirit in the moving world, the developer of birth and action, the enjoying and observing deity for whom the whole mutable becoming is the object of its consciousness (8·4). In us it appears as the soul that desires and suffers, that is carried from birth to birth upon the wheel of the modes; and at first sight it seems only the captive of a Maya by which “this whole world is bewildered and does not recognise Me supreme beyond them and imperishable” (7·13).

Between these two, the silent and the moving, the mind finds no bridge. The Kshara acts; the Akshara stands apart. The one is all relation and the other none; and the intelligence, seeking an easy clarity, is tempted either to make them two eternally separate principles, as the Sankhya made soul and Nature, or to declare the moving world an illusion and the silence alone real. Sri Aurobindo shows the Gita refusing both these escapes. The Kshara is not to be abolished, for it too is spirit, a truth of the Supreme; but neither can it be taken by itself.

In the Kshara taken alone as a thing in itself, the mutable universal apart from the undivided Immutable and the Transcendent, there is no completeness of knowledge, no completeness of our being and therefore no liberation.

Nor is the Akshara, as we have seen, the whole solution. To live in the silence while Nature continues her works in our instruments leaves us a double being, a freedom within and a subjection without, an unmoved witness above and a mechanism of the gunas below, the one indifferent to what the other does. Either the soul’s works would then be of no consequence to it, Arjuna moved to battle by some rajasic impulse in the instruments or held back by tamasic inertia, or the whole matter would be a mechanical determinism of Nature; or else, the soul withdrawing more and more into its silence, the end would be quiescence and not the action the Gita demands. This duality of quiescent Purusha and active Prakriti, Sri Aurobindo insists, is not the whole of our being, and its two terms are not the last words in the matter.

Here the metaphysical necessity becomes acute. The first six chapters have carried the soul as far as these two truths can carry it: out of desire, out of ego, into equality and the calm of the Brahman. They have hinted at a Lord of works who exceeds even the immutable Self, but have not said who he is. And a question presses which the first truths cannot answer. Whence comes the will to act, if not from the gunas? Is there a Nature other than the Nature of the three modes, a power of will and action that is not ego and desire, mind and sense and reason? Unless there is, the promised freedom in works must remain either an illusion or a half-truth. The rest of the Gita is written to answer that question; and its first answer is the doctrine of the two Natures.

parā prakṛti

The Higher Nature

“This is my eightfold divided Nature,” says the Teacher, naming the five elemental conditions of matter, the mind, the reason and the ego; “this the lower. But know my other Nature different from this, the supreme which becomes the Jiva and by which this world is upheld” (7·4–5).

अपरेयमितस्त्वन्यां प्रकृतिं विद्धि मे पराम् ।जीवभूतां महाबाहो ययेदं धार्यते जगत् ॥

apareyamitastvanyāṃ prakṛtiṃ viddhi me parāmjīvabhūtāṃ mahābāho yayedaṃ dhāryate jagat

With these words the Gita steps beyond the Sankhya on which it had so far built. The eightfold Prakriti is Nature as the Sankhya knew her; and because the Sankhya stopped there, it had to set up an unbridgeable division between soul and Nature. The Gita goes further, to a nature of the Spirit itself.

In this highest dynamis Purusha and Prakriti are one. Prakriti there is only the will and the executive power of the Purusha, his activity of being, — not a separate entity, but himself in Power.

This is the answer to the question that was left open. There is a higher Nature, parā prakṛti, the conscious power of the Supreme himself, of which the lower Nature of the gunas is only a derivation and a dark shadow. In the immutable Self this power is held back from action; in the mutable world it comes forth into action; and in each being it manifests as the svabhāva, the essential quality and self-principle of its becoming. The Teacher gives instances. He is the taste in the waters and the light of sun and moon, the intelligence of the intelligent, “the strength of the strong devoid of desire and liking,” and “in beings the desire which is not contrary to dharma” (7·11). The sattwic, rajasic and tamasic becomings are from him, “but I am not in them, it is they that are in Me” (7·12). The strong man’s strength is divine in its essence, though in its derivative action it falls into the grasp of desire; the Divine is there in that essential power and upholds him until he can govern his will from above, from his own higher nature.

Consider what this means for works. The will to act need no longer be the will of ego and the modes, and the freed soul need no longer choose between a mechanical activity and a silent abstention. There is a divine will in the being, a spiritual kāma, which Sri Aurobindo reads as “the desire of the divine Delight of existence unrolling its own conscious force of action in accordance with the law of the swabhava.” Action from that source is not bondage but the self-expression of the Spirit; and even the Maya of the gunas, hard as it is to cross, is “my divine Maya” (7·14), a veil woven by the Godhead over his own face, which those who turn to him pass beyond. The lower Nature is not to be annulled but traced back to its source and there transformed. In the doctrine of the two Natures lies the metaphysical ground of divine works. Without it the Gita’s gospel of action would be at best a discipline for the imperfect, to be left behind by the perfect; with it, action becomes the play of the Spirit’s own power in Time.

mamaivāṃśaḥ sanātanaḥ

The Eternal Portion

The higher Nature, the Gita says, has become the Jiva; and the phrase is chosen with care. Sri Aurobindo observes that it is not said that the supreme Nature is in its essence the Jiva, jīvātmikā, but that it has become the Jiva, jīvabhūtā, so that behind this manifestation it remains something greater, the nature of the one supreme Spirit. In the fifteenth chapter the same truth is spoken from the side of the soul.

ममैवांशो जीवलोके जीवभूतः सनातनः ।मनःषष्ठानीन्द्रियाणि प्रकृतिस्थानि कर्षति ॥

mamaivāṃśo jīvaloke jīvabhūtaḥ sanātanaḥmanaḥṣaṣṭhānīndriyāṇi prakṛtisthāni karṣati

“It is an eternal portion of Me that becomes the Jiva in the world of living creatures.” The ego is a formation of the lower Nature, a knot of mind and sense and desire that calls itself “I,” and it must be undone. But the Jiva is not the ego. It is the Lord himself in a partial manifestation, one with the Divine in being, different from him only in that it supports the one power of the Spirit in a partial and individualised action. Its individuality is therefore no accident to be dissolved at the moment of liberation, but an eternal truth of the Divine’s own multiplicity.

For it means that each soul, each being in its spiritual reality is the very Divine, however partial its actual manifestation of him in Nature. And it means too, if words have any sense, that each manifesting spirit, each of the many, is an eternal individual, an eternal unborn and undying power of the one Existence.

This is why the Gita, even where it seems to speak the language of the strictest non-dualism, avoids every expression that would suggest a final extinction, laya, of the soul in the Infinite, and speaks rather of a dwelling in the Supreme: “doubt not that thou shalt dwell in Me” (12·8). And here too a necessity of action is answered. If there were no eternal individual, the liberated man’s works would have no true author; they would be the last movements of a dissolving ego, a momentum of the gunas continuing after the soul had departed from them. Because there is a Jiva, there can be muktasya karma, the action of the liberated, flowing from a real spiritual person who is a centre of the Divine’s own will in the world. And because there is a Jiva, there can be love. Devotion asks for two, the lover and the Beloved; a soul that was only a passing figure of ignorance could not adore, and a Supreme without eternal portions of himself would have none to receive his answering delight. The eternal portion is the ground of bhakti as the higher Nature is the ground of divine works.

The Gita adds a condition. This identity of the Lord and the soul is hidden by the crowding figures of Nature. The deluded do not perceive him in his coming in and going forth, in his staying and enjoying; they perceive who have the eye of knowledge (15·10). The Yogins who strive see the Lord in themselves, while those who are not formed in the spiritual mould perceive him not (15·11). The truth of the Jiva is a status to be grown into, a self to be built within us until the eternal portion stands forth and takes up the instruments of Nature as its own.

īśvara

The Lord in the Heart

A soul free in the Self, a will that proceeds from the higher Nature, an eternal individual who acts: all these still require a centre to which the action is referred. Works cannot hang in the void; they are offered or they are claimed, and if the ego no longer claims them, another must receive them. From the fourth chapter onward the Gita has spoken of the Lord of sacrifice, the Master of works, “the Enjoyer of sacrifice and tapasya … the mighty lord of all the worlds, the friend of all creatures” (5·29). In the eighth chapter he names himself adhiyajña, the Lord of sacrifice here in the body (8·4); and in the thirteenth the Supreme Soul is shown seated in this very body in all his offices at once (13·23).

Seated in this body is her and our Divinity, the supreme Self, Paramatman, the supreme Soul, the mighty Lord of Nature, who watches her action, sanctions her operations, upholds all she does, commands her manifold creation, enjoys with his universal delight this play of her figures of his own being.

Here is the Ishwara, and with him the temper of the whole teaching changes. The Purusha of the Sankhya was a witness who could only reflect and consent, “but not actively the Ishwara.” The Lord of the Gita is witness and more than witness: he sanctions, upholds, commands and enjoys. The immutable Self gave the soul its freedom; the Ishwara gives that freedom a direction and a meaning. It is he who has already slain the armies that Arjuna fears to slay, he of whom the human warrior is only the instrument; it is his will, and not the blind stress of the modes, that moves in the crisis of the race. And he is not far. “The Lord, O Arjuna, is seated in the heart of all beings” (18·61), turning them upon the machine of his Maya; yet this spirit, Sri Aurobindo says, is our own greatest self, and it shapes us according to the real idea and truth of ourselves which is growing in us birth after birth.

ईश्वरः सर्वभूतानां हृद्देशेऽर्जुन तिष्ठति ।भ्रामयन्सर्वभूतानि यन्त्रारूढानि मायया ॥

īśvaraḥ sarvabhūtānāṃ hṛddeśe’rjuna tiṣṭhatibhrāmayansarvabhūtāni yantrārūḍhāni māyayā

This intimacy is the note which the bare metaphysics of Self and Nature could never sound. The Lord who “enjoys with his universal delight this play” is the same who sits in Arjuna’s chariot holding the reins, who smiled upon his despair and will at the last call him dear. What was the Witness becomes the Companion; the Master of works is revealed as the Friend of all creatures. The practical necessity this truth answers is the need of the freed soul for a Master to whom its works can be given without remainder. The deeper necessity it answers is the need of the heart, which cannot rest in an impersonal equality however luminous, and seeks someone to whom it may give itself. “In him take refuge in every way of thy being,” says the Teacher, “and by his grace thou shalt come to the supreme peace and the eternal status” (18·62). By that refuge the machine of Nature is seen to have been all along the hand of a Lover, shaping the soul towards himself.

puruṣottama

The Highest Person

At last the Gita names what it has been approaching from the beginning. There are two Purushas in this world, the mutable which is all these existences, and the immutable, the high-seated Kutastha (15·16). And then:

उत्तमः पुरुषस्त्वन्यः परमात्मेत्युदाहृतः ।यो लोकत्रयमाविश्य बिभर्त्यव्यय ईश्वरः ॥

uttamaḥ puruṣastvanyaḥ paramātmetyudāhṛtaḥyo lokatrayamāviśya bibhartyavyaya īśvaraḥ

Sri Aurobindo calls this verse the keyword of the Gita’s reconciliation of the two apparently opposite aspects of our existence. The Purushottama is not a third thing set beside the Kshara and the Akshara, as though the universe had three rival principles; he is that which is both, and because he is both, he is greater than either. The Akshara is he in the freedom of his self-existence, untouched by the play of his Nature; the Kshara is he in his eternal multiplicity, the soul of all becomings; the higher Nature is his own power of being; the Jiva is his eternal portion; the Ishwara is he seated in the heart. All the preceding truths, which to the dividing mind seemed to exclude one another, are seen here as the confronting faces of a single Reality: “Since I am beyond the mutable and am greater and higher even than the immutable, in the world and the Veda I am proclaimed as the Purushottama” (15·18).

He is both Akshara and Kshara, and yet he is other because he is more and greater than either of these opposites.

What necessity does this final truth answer? The necessity of the whole. Without it the soul must oscillate between the two attractions that draw the mind and heart and will of man in different directions, the attraction of the silence and the attraction of the world, each insistent to annul the other. With it the soul can be at once still and active, impersonal and personal, free in the Self and engaged in Nature, without division. And this is precisely the life the Gita asks of Arjuna: to be inwardly calm in the silence of the Eternal and yet to do with power the works of the Eternal in the world. The Divine himself, who has nothing to gain in all the three worlds, abides verily in the paths of action (3·22); the soul that has found him may do the same.

The chapter closes with a verse that turns the whole metaphysics into a single movement of the being. “He who undeluded thus has knowledge of Me as the Purushottama, adores Me (has bhakti for Me) with all-knowledge and in every way of his natural being” (15·19). The knower of the Purushottama is sarvavid, the whole-knower; and the fruit of his whole knowledge is not a completed theory but an adoration, bhajati, offered sarvabhāvena, with the entire nature. The summit of the Gita’s metaphysics is a Person, and the true answer to a Person is love. Here the architecture reveals its purpose. Every stone was laid so that the soul might stand at last before the One who is its Self, its Nature, its Lord and its Beloved, and give itself to him entire.

Three Powers of the One Spirit, and the One who Exceeds Them

Seen whole, the Gita’s metaphysics is not a ladder whose lower rungs are kicked away as we climb, but a temple in which every chamber remains inhabited. The immutable Self is never abandoned: it is the ground of equality on which all else is built. Nature is never merely condemned: the lower is traced to the higher, and the higher is the Divine’s own power. The Jiva is never dissolved: it is the eternal portion through which the Supreme loves and acts in the world. The Lord in the heart is never outgrown: he is the Purushottama himself, come near. Each truth answers a real need of the soul in action, and no single truth answers all of them; only the One in whom they are one can do that.

Divine in the equality of his imperturbable self-existence, one in it with all objects and creatures, he brings that boundless equality, that deep oneness down into his mind and heart and life and body and founds on it in an indivisible integrality the trinity of divine love, divine works and divine knowledge. This is the Gita’s way of salvation.

So the warrior who began with the question, What shall I do? is answered at last by a revelation of who he is and of whom he stands before. He is an eternal portion of the Divine, freed in the silent Self, moved by the higher Nature, the instrument of the Lord in his heart, the beloved of the Supreme Person who is all this and more. From that knowledge action flows of itself, no longer a burden taken up in grief but a play of the Spirit’s delight. The charioteer smiled at the beginning because he knew the end; and the soul that has seen him as the Purushottama begins, in its own measure, to share that smile.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 2

1. 20

Chapter 3

1. 27

Chapter 13

1. 30

Chapter 15

1. 16

Chapter 7

1. 4
2. 5
3. 12
4. 14

Chapter 15

1. 7

Chapter 13

1. 23

Chapter 18

1. 61

Chapter 15

1. 17
2. 18
3. 19

• The Two Natures
• The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge
• The Supreme Divine
• The Field and its Knower
• The Three Purushas
• The Fullness of Spiritual Action
• Sankhya and Yoga
• Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta
• The Divine Worker
• Swabhava and Swadharma