The Vision of the World-Spirit

XII

कालोऽस्मि लोकक्षयकृत्प्रवृद्धो

kālo’smi lokakṣayakṛtpravṛddho

It is the Timeless manifest as Time and World-Spirit from whom the command to action proceeds.

The eleventh chapter of the Gita is the one that even those who have never read the book seem to remember: the form of a thousand suns, the numberless arms and eyes, the burning mouths into which the armies of the world are rushing, and the voice that says, “I am the Time-Spirit, destroyer of the world.” It is so vivid that it is easily taken for a spectacle, a great poetic interlude set down between two tracts of doctrine. Sri Aurobindo will not let it be read so. The vision, he writes, is one of the best known and most powerfully poetic passages in the Gita, “but its place in the thought is not altogether on the surface.” It stands exactly where it must stand, and it shows exactly what must be shown, if the question with which the book began is ever to receive an answer the whole man can accept.

And it raises a question of its own which every serious reader has felt. Why should the gentlest of teachers, the charioteer who smiled upon his disciple’s despair (2·10), who has spoken to him of equality and sacrifice and the peace of the Brahman, and who has told him that the heart which delights in God is the heart of true devotion, now show him the most terrible face that any scripture has dared to give to the Divine? And why, having shown it, does he veil it again and return to the gentle human form? The answer to these two questions is the whole meaning of the chapter. The terror is shown because it is true, and the soul that would act in God must not be permitted to worship only a chosen part of Him; the gentleness returns because it is equally true, and more intimate, and because behind the mask of Time there is a face that the world rightly rejoices to behold.

divyaṃ cakṣuḥ

The Desire to See

Arjuna’s request does not come from curiosity. He has heard, as he says, the highest spiritual secret of existence, and by it his delusion has been dispelled (11·1); he has understood the birth and passing away of existences and the imperishable greatness of the divine Soul (11·2). Sri Aurobindo notes how much has already changed in him: the illusion that things exist in themselves or for themselves apart from God “has passed from him, — that was the cause of his doubt and bewilderment and refusal of action.” Yet something remains. He has heard of the Divine; he would now see Him, the very form and body of the Godhead, “if that be possible” (11·3–4). And the reason the Teacher grants this is not to satisfy a longing but to prepare an action: “For this greatest all-comprehending vision he is made to ask because it is so, from the Spirit revealed in the universe, that he must receive the command to his part in the world-action.”

But the human eye cannot see what is to be shown.

न तु मां शक्यसे द्रष्टुम् अनेनैव स्वचक्षुषा ।दिव्यं ददामि ते चक्षुः पश्य मे योगमैश्वरम् ॥

na tu māṃ śakyase draṣṭum anenaiva svacakṣuṣādivyaṃ dadāmi te cakṣuḥ paśya me yogamaiśvaram

The divine eye, divyaṃ cakṣuḥ, is not a sharper organ of the same kind. The outward eye sees the surfaces of things, or makes out of them separate symbols, each significant of only a few aspects of the eternal Mystery; the inmost seeing beholds them all at once in their relation to the One from whom they come. It is this seeing, and not any new doctrine, that the chapter gives.

It is the vision of the One in the many, the Many in the One, — and all are the One. It is this vision that to the eye of the divine Yoga liberates, justifies, explains all that is and was and shall be.

Everything in the chapter follows from this keynote. The vision will be terrible, but its terror is not its meaning; its meaning is unity. If the soul could hold that unity whole, Sri Aurobindo observes, all even that is terrible in the world would lose its terror, and it could “accept the whole of existence with an all-embracing joy and a mighty courage.” Arjuna has not yet arrived there, and therefore he will be afraid. The fear is not a failure of the vision but a measure of the distance between the soul that sees and the unity it sees.

viśvarūpa

A Thousand Suns

The first thing Arjuna beholds is not terror but splendour. The Master of Yoga shows him his supreme form (11·9): a Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whom are all the wonders of existence, seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from innumerable mouths, robed in heavenly raiment, lovely with garlands of divine flowers, fragrant with divine perfumes (11·10–11).

दिवि सूर्यसहस्रस्य भवेद्युगपदुत्थिता ।यदि भाः सदृशी सा स्याद् भासस्तस्य महात्मनः ॥

divi sūryasahasrasya bhavedyugapadutthitāyadi bhāḥ sadṛśī sā syād bhāsastasya mahātmanaḥ

The whole world, multitudinously divided and yet unified, is visible in the body of the God of Gods (11·13). This is not the blank unity of an abstraction, in which all difference is abolished; the gods are there, and the companies of beings, and Brahma seated on the Lotus, and the Rishis and the divine Serpents, each one itself, and all of them one. Arjuna sees, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, “God magnificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who has manifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild and monstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terrible world.” And his response is threefold, “overcome with marvel and joy and fear” (11·14); he bows down and adores with clasped hands.

It is worth pausing on that joy. The Gita does not say that Arjuna first delights and later, seeing more, is only afraid; the marvel, the joy and the fear arise together, because the object is one. The beauty of the Form is not a veil laid over its terror, nor is the terror a truth that cancels the beauty. The world which the Divine has made in his being is at once wild and orderly, sweet and terrible, and the soul that sees it truly will feel both at once. In his hymn Arjuna names what he sees with the words of the whole preceding teaching: “Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we have to know, thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe” (11·15–18). The knowledge of the seventh to the tenth chapters has become sight.

Yet already in this first vision there is a hint of what is coming. The Form is “armed for battle with numberless divine uplifted weapons.” The Lord of the Vibhuti, whose splendour is in every glorious thing, is also the Lord of the battle; and the battlefield of Kurukshetra, which Arjuna had begun to forget in the wonder of the vision, is about to return, seen now from within the being of God.

ugrarūpa

The Mouths of Time

Then the vision turns. The Immeasurable without end or middle or beginning is he in whom all things begin and exist and end; his eyes are suns and moons, his face is blazing fire, and he is ever burning up the whole universe with the flame of his energy (11·19). The mouths gape, terrible with many tusks of destruction, faces like the fires of Death and Time (11·25); and into them Arjuna sees the sons of Dhritarashtra hastening, and Bhishma and Drona and Karna, and the foremost warriors of his own side too (11·26–27). They go as many rushing waters race toward the ocean, as moths with ever-increasing speed fall into a kindled fire (11·28–29). The world is shaken, and Arjuna with it: “I lose sense of the directions and find no peace.” His cry breaks from him: “Declare to me who Thou art that wearest this form of fierceness … I would know who Thou art who wast from the beginning, for I know not the will of Thy workings” (11·31).

This is the ancient question, and Sri Aurobindo does not soften it. It is an aspect, he says, “from which the mind in men willingly turns away and ostrich-like hides its head,” because “the weakness of the human heart wants only fair and comforting truths or in their absence pleasant fables.” The religious mind has invented many devices to escape it: a Devil who bears the blame for all that is terrible, a Nature set apart from God, a humanity whose sins are made the author of the world’s suffering. The Gita takes refuge in none of these.

We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and destroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and evil on which we are racked is his touch as much as happiness and sweetness and pleasure.

This is hard, and it is meant to be hard; but it is not despair. The same Gita that shows these images, Sri Aurobindo reminds us, “speaks of the Godhead who embodies himself in them as the lover and friend of all creatures.” To refuse the terrible aspect is not to honour the divine Love but to diminish it, to make it partial and a little illusory, since a love that does not govern the whole world is not the love of the Lord of the world. It is only when we see with the eye of complete union, he says, that we can “entirely discover behind that mask too the calm and beautiful face of the all-blissful Godhead.” The terror is a mask; but the mask is his, and it must be looked upon before it can be seen through.

kālo'smi

I Am Time

To Arjuna’s question the Godhead answers in the most unsparing words of the book.

श्रीभगवानुवाच:कालोऽस्मि लोकक्षयकृत्प्रवृद्धोलोकान्समाहर्तुमिह प्रवृत्तः ।ऋतेऽपि त्वां न भविष्यन्ति सर्वेयेऽवस्थिताः प्रत्यनीकेषु योधाः ॥

śrībhagavānuvāca:kālo’smi lokakṣayakṛtpravṛddholokānsamāhartumiha pravṛttaḥṛte’pi tvāṃ na bhaviṣyanti sarveye’vasthitāḥ pratyanīkeṣu yodhāḥ

“I am the Time-Spirit, destroyer of the world, arisen huge-statured for the destruction of the nations. Even without thee all these warriors shall be not.” The Sanskrit is stark: kālo’smi, I am Time. Yet Sri Aurobindo is careful to say what this does and does not mean. The Godhead does not mean “either that he is the Time-Spirit alone or that the whole essence of the Time-Spirit is destruction.” It is the present will of his workings, his pravṛtti at this moment of the world, that is destruction; and destruction is never alone.

Destruction is always a simultaneous or alternate element which keeps pace with creation and it is by destroying and renewing that the Master of Life does his long work of preservation. More, destruction is the first condition of progress.

This law runs inward as well as outward. “Inwardly, the man who does not destroy his lower self-formations, cannot rise to a greater existence.” Every seeker knows this Time in himself: the old habits of the mind, the cherished forms of the ego, the comfortable rules of a smaller dharma, go one by one into the mouths of the Destroyer, and it is only by their going that the soul grows. Outwardly the same law governs nations and ages; a people that shrinks too long from destroying and replacing its outworn forms is itself destroyed. “No real peace can be till the heart of man deserves peace; the law of Vishnu cannot prevail till the debt to Rudra is paid.”

Seen so, the face of Time is not the face of a malignant fate. It is the Timeless himself, turned toward the world in one of his necessary movements, and the Essays can say that God the Time-Spirit “does not destroy for the sake of destruction, but to make the ways clear in the cyclic process for a greater rule and a progressing manifestation.” Nor is this the final word on the battle that man wages with the world. “Man can only exceed the law of battle by discovering the greater law of his immortality.” The vision of Time is shown to the soul not so that it may make an idol of destruction, but so that it may stop pretending that destruction lies outside God, and may find, within the whirl of perishing forms, the Spirit that does not perish.

nimittamātra

Only the Occasion

Now the command comes, and the reason for the whole vision is laid bare. “Therefore arise, get thee glory, conquer thy enemies and enjoy an opulent kingdom. By me and none other already even are they slain, do thou become the occasion only, O Savyasachin” (11·33). Nimittamātraṃ bhava: be the occasion only. Arjuna’s recoil in the first chapter rested on the belief that the slaughter would be his doing, that by refusing he could prevent it. The vision has shown him that the event is already accomplished in the eternal will, and that his abstention would change nothing but his own place in it. Sri Aurobindo presses the point: abstention “will not help, will not prevent the fulfilment of the destroying Will, but rather by the lacuna it creates increase confusion.” And the eighteenth chapter will add that even his nature would not permit it: “thy nature shall appoint thee to thy work” (18·59).

But this is precisely the teaching that the ego most readily steals. If all is the will of God and man only the instrument, may not any violence clothe itself in the name of the divine will? The Gita closes this door in the same chapter. The one who comes to the Lord is the doer of His works who is “free from attachment and without enmity to all existences” (11·55). The divine worker, as the Essays describe him, “will not cherish personal enmity, anger, hatred, egoistic desire and passion, will not hasten towards strife or lust after violence and destruction like the fierce Asura.” The instrument is not a soul that has abdicated its conscience to a terrible God; it is a soul that has been emptied of the ego which alone could make the terrible work its own.

Not appalled by the face of the Destroyer, he will see within it the eternal Spirit imperishable in all these perishing bodies and behind it the face of the Charioteer, the Leader of man, the Friend of all creatures.

Here is the heart of the chapter’s paradox. The command to the terrible work is given by the terrible Form; but the one who obeys it rightly sees, behind that Form, the face of the Charioteer. The Destroyer and the Friend are not two. That is why the command can be obeyed without hatred, and why the fruit it promises, the glory and the kingdom, is not a spoil seized by desire but, in Sri Aurobindo’s words, “the glory given by the Divine to himself in his Vibhuti.”

sthāne hṛṣīkeśa

The World Rejoices

The first words Arjuna speaks after the Godhead has answered him are not words of fear. “Rightly and in good place, O Krishna, does the world rejoice and take pleasure in Thy name; the Rakshasas are fleeing from Thee in terror to all the quarters and the companies of the Siddhas bow down before Thee in adoration” (11·36). Something in him has already begun to see through the mask. Sri Aurobindo draws out the meaning of this sudden rejoicing:

It is the profound sense of that which makes us see in the dark face of Kali the face of the Mother and to perceive even in the midst of destruction the protecting arms of the Friend of creatures, in the midst of evil the presence of a pure unalterable Benignity and in the midst of death the Master of Immortality.

“Nothing has real need to fear,” he continues, “except that which is to be destroyed, the evil, the ignorance, the veilers in Night, the Rakshasa powers.” The terror of the Destroyer is real, but it is the terror of the darkness before the light; to the Siddhas, who live in the truth of his being, every form of Him is to be adored. And so Arjuna’s hymn rises: Thou art the original Creator, greater even than Brahma; the Immutable and what is and is not; the ancient Soul and the supreme resting-place of this All (11·37–38); salutation to Thee in front and behind and from every side, for Thou art each and all that is (11·40).

Then comes a turn so human that it moves the heart. Arjuna remembers the charioteer he has known, and asks forgiveness for every word spoken “thinking of Thee only as my human friend and companion, ‘O Krishna, O Yadava, O Comrade’”, for every jest, at play, on the couch, at the banquet (11·41–42). “As a father to his son, as a friend to his friend and comrade, as one dear with him he loves, so shouldst Thou, O Godhead, bear with me” (11·44). He had seen only the man and missed the God. Yet in the very prayer for pardon the human relations return, and they return not as errors to be abandoned but as the forms through which the infinite Godhead is to be approached.

The adoration by which the finite creature bows down before the Infinite, receives all its sweetness and draws near to a closest truth of companionship and oneness when it deepens into the more intimate adoration which lives in the sense of the fatherhood of God, the friendhood of God, the attracting love between the Divine Spirit and our human soul and nature.

Here, Sri Aurobindo says, is the seed of the Vaishnava bhakti which afterwards received “a more deep, ecstatic and significant extension.” The friendship was not a mistake. It was the Divine wearing the human relation as a robe, so that the relation might find in God its fullest sense.

saumya vapus

The Gentle Form and the Door of Love

“I have seen what never was seen before and I rejoice, but my mind is troubled with fear. O Godhead, show me that other form of Thine” (11·45). Arjuna asks to see again the crowned and four-armed shape (11·46), and the Godhead grants it; but first he tells him that the soul in perfect Yoga would behold the great Form without trembling, “without pain, without confusion of mind, without any sinking of the members. Cast away fear and let thy heart rejoice” (11·49). Then Vasudeva assumes again “the desired form of grace and love and sweetness” and consoles the terrified one (11·50), and Arjuna answers: “Beholding again Thy gentle human form, O Janardana, my heart is filled with delight and I am restored to my own nature” (11·51).

This return is not a retreat from truth. The universal Form, Sri Aurobindo writes, is to the liberated spirit “a thing mighty, encouraging and fortifying,” but to the normal man “overwhelming, appalling, incommunicable.” A link is needed by which the soul can find the universal Godhead close to itself; and that link is the gracious mediating form, the Charioteer of the battle and the journey. “It is this mediating aspect which man must have for his support constantly before him.” The gentle form does not hide the Infinite; it brings the Infinite near enough to be loved.

And love, the chapter ends by declaring, is the only door. The greater Form cannot be won by Veda or austerities or gifts or sacrifice; “it can be seen, known, entered into only by that bhakti which regards, adores and loves Me alone in all things” (11·53–54).

This vision can be reached only by the absolute adoration, the love, the intimate unity that crowns at their summit the fullness of works and knowledge.

मत्कर्मकृन्मत्परमो मद्भक्तः संगवर्जितः ।निर्वैरः सर्वभूतेषु यः स मामेति पाण्डव ॥

matkarmakṛnmatparamo madbhaktaḥ saṃgavarjitaḥnirvairaḥ sarvabhūteṣu yaḥ sa māmeti pāṇḍava

The last verse gathers the whole Gita into a single sentence: works done for Him, the Supreme accepted as the one object, love, freedom from attachment, and no enmity to any creature. It is spoken in the chapter of the Destroyer, and it is the gentlest law in the book. The soul that has seen the mouths of Time, and seen through them to the Friend, is asked for nothing but this.

The double aspect: what is seen, and what is seen behind it

What, then, has Arjuna seen? Not a God of destruction beside a God of love, nor a terrible truth softened afterwards by a consoling one, but a single Being who is at once the Time that devours and the Timeless that loves, and whose devouring is itself a movement of that love toward a greater manifestation. He has seen that the work from which he recoiled was already done in God; that his part is to be its occasion, without hatred and without desire; and that the charioteer who has been beside him from the beginning, who smiled at his despair and bore with his jests, is the same Spirit before whom the gods tremble and in whose name the world rejoices. It is because he has faced the one that he can love the other without illusion.

For the Gita, the terror is real and it is not the last word; the last word is delight. Sri Aurobindo gives it its full measure: “The discords of the worlds are God’s discords and it is only by accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive at the greater concords of his supreme harmony, the summits and thrilled vastnesses of his transcendent and his cosmic Ananda.” The flute is heard again after the conch; but it is heard now by one who knows what the conch meant, and who can therefore stand in the battle, as the chapter’s close invites him, with a heart that has cast away fear and rejoices.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 11

1. 3
2. 8
3. 12
4. 14
5. 19
6. 28
7. 29
8. 31
9. 32
10. 33
11. 36
12. 44
13. 45
14. 49
15. 50
16. 51
17. 54
18. 55

• The Vision of the World Spirit; Time and Destroyer
• The Vision of the World Spirit; The Double Aspect
• The Way and the Bhakta
• The Secret of Secrets
• The Two Natures