The Gita as a Science of Consciousness

XIII

बुद्धेः परतस्तु सः

buddheḥ paratastu saḥ

…the Liberator is within us, but it is not our mind, nor our intelligence, nor our personal will, — they are only instruments. It is the Lord in whom, as we are told in the end, we have utterly to take refuge.

There is a psychology which watches the mind as a naturalist watches the weather, noting its winds and its seasons and content to have named them; and there is another, older and more exacting, which studies the instruments of consciousness only in order to discover who it is that uses them and how they may be given back to their true Master. The Bhagavad Gita belongs wholly to the second kind. It is not a treatise on the mind and it nowhere pauses to classify for the pleasure of classifying; yet no scripture has looked more steadily into the working of the senses and the sense-mind, the ego and the discriminating intelligence, or traced with a surer hand the road by which a being broken in all its parts may be recomposed around its secret centre. Its science is conducted not in the quiet of a hermitage but between two armies, upon a man in whom every faculty has given way at once; and its proof is not a doctrine accepted but a warrior who rises and acts.

To read the Gita in this light is not to reduce it to a psychology. It is to see that its metaphysics are never idle, that each truth of the Self and of the Lord is given at the exact point where some power of the nature has need of it, and that the whole teaching moves from the outer instruments inward and upward to that which stands beyond them all. The senses, the mind, the intelligent will, and beyond the intelligent will, he: this is the ladder the Gita sets up in a single verse, and it is also, when we look closely, the ladder of Arjuna’s restoration. At its summit, or rather in its hidden depth, there waits not a cold witness but the Friend who smiled when His disciple fell, and whose name in the text is Hrishikesha, the Master of the senses.

viṣāda

The Bankruptcy of the Whole Being

Every science begins from its data, and the first datum of the Gita is a collapse. When the chariot has been stayed between the armies and Arjuna looks upon the faces he must strike, the failure does not begin in the reason. It begins in the body: the limbs sink, the mouth is parched, the frame shakes, the skin burns, and the great bow Gandiva slips from the hand 1·28–30. Only afterwards does the heart find its voice in grief for its “own people,” and only after the heart does the moral mind arrive with its grave arguments about the ruin of the clan and the dissolution of the ancestral law. The order is itself a revelation. The nervous being revolts first; the emotional being lends its cry to the revolt; and the intelligence, which should have judged, comes in last as an advocate to plead a case that sensation and feeling have already decided.

The revolt itself is the most elemental and simple possible; sensationally, the elemental feeling of horror, pity and disgust; vitally, the loss of attraction and faith in the recognised and familiar objects of action and aims of life; emotionally, the recoil of the ordinary feelings of social man, affection, reverence, desire of a common happiness and satisfaction, from a stern duty outraging them all; morally, the elementary sense of sin and hell and rejection of “blood-stained enjoyments”; practically, the sense that the standards of action have led to a result which destroys the practical aims of action.

Sri Aurobindo’s account of the crisis is exact to the point of anatomy, and it deserves to be dwelt upon, because the rest of the Gita is the answer to it. Nothing in Arjuna is left standing: not the body that trembles, not the life-force that has lost its faith in the aims of action, not the affections, not the ethical sense, not the practical reason. His own confession names the condition: poorness of spirit has smitten away his true heroic nature, and his whole consciousness is bewildered in its view of right and wrong 2·7. It is not one faculty that has erred and may be corrected by another; it is the whole instrumentation of the human being that has lost its centre. Therefore no partial remedy will serve. A soothing of the nerves would leave the reason in its perplexity; a fresh argument would leave the heart in its grief; the appeal to heroic honour, which Krishna sounds for a moment and does not rest upon 2·2–3, would only set one part of the ego against another. What is needed is a knowledge of the whole instrument and of the one for whom it exists: a science, in the old sense of the word, of the soul and its powers.

buddhi · ahaṃkāra · manas · indriya

The Order of the Instruments

The Gita receives its map of the inner world from the Sankhya, and Sri Aurobindo is careful to set this map before us before he speaks of the Yoga of the intelligent will. On one side stands the Purusha, the conscious soul, calm, inactive, immutable; on the other Prakriti, Nature-force, which by the contact of the soul becomes the whole active play of our subjective and objective life. It is not the soul but Nature that supplies the instruments. First out of Nature-force comes the buddhi, the discriminating and determining power, and with it the ahaṃkāra, the ego-sense, which he describes as “the subjective principle in Buddhi by which the Purusha is induced to identify himself with Prakriti and her activities.” Out of these arises manas, the sense-mind that seizes the discriminations of objects; out of the sense-mind the ten organic senses, five of knowledge and five of action; and beyond them the objects of sense. The Gita itself names this constitution when it speaks of the eightfold lower nature of the Divine, the five elements with mind, reason and ego 7·4, and again when it describes the Field 13·6.

Buddhi, the word used, means, properly speaking, the mental power of understanding but it is evidently used by the Gita in a large philosophic sense for the whole action of the discriminating and deciding mind which determines both the direction and use of our thoughts and the direction and use of our acts… Will, then, and knowledge are the two functions of the Buddhi.

Everything in the Gita’s psychology turns upon this double function. The buddhi is not merely the power that thinks; it is the power that decides, that fixes its aim and persists in it. And its degradation in the lower instrument is double also, for manas, in Sri Aurobindo’s phrase, becomes “sense-perception and desire, the two crude terms or degradations of intelligence and will.” Here is the key to the whole malady. Desire is not an alien thing thrust into us from without; it is will fallen from its seat, will that has descended into the sense-mind and there, captured by the attractions of objects, has forgotten its own nature. The ego-sense, standing at the very root of the instrument, lends to all these movements the conviction that they are “I,” so that the soul, which only witnesses and sanctions, believes itself to be the one that craves and grieves and strikes. While the actions are being done entirely by the modes of Nature, says the Gita, he whose self is bewildered by egoism thinks that it is his “I” which is doing them 3·27. The science of the Gita is the undoing of this bewilderment, and it proceeds, as every true science must, by retracing the order of generation back to its source.

indriyāṇi parāṇyāhuḥ

The Ladder of the Third Chapter

Nature evolves downward, from the intelligence to the sense and from the sense to the object; the soul that would recover itself must climb the same stair in the reverse direction. Sri Aurobindo sees in this reversal the very plan of the Gita’s Yoga.

In the evolution of the soul back from Prakriti towards Purusha, the reverse order has to be taken to the original Nature-evolution, and that is how the Upanishads and the Gita following and almost quoting the Upanishads state the ascending order of our subjective powers.

इन्द्रियाणि पराण्याहुर् इन्द्रियेभ्यः परं मनः ।मनसस्तु परा बुद्धिर् यो बुद्धेः परतस्तु सः ॥

indriyāṇi parāṇyāhur indriyebhyaḥ paraṃ manaḥmanasastu parā buddhir yo buddheḥ paratastu saḥ

The verse is spoken almost in passing, at the close of Krishna’s answer about desire, yet it holds the whole architecture of the inner discipline. Each rung is a power that may either be carried away by the one beneath it or lifted and ruled by the one above. The senses, left to their objects, rush outward; the mind, lending itself to the senses, is dragged after them; the buddhi, subjected to the mind, loses its calm discrimination and becomes the servant of desire. Reverse the movement and the whole being is gathered home. Sri Aurobindo gives the image with a loving exactness: the senses are to be drawn back “as the tortoise draws in his limbs into the shell,” and drawn back not into a void but into their source, “quiescent in the mind, the mind quiescent in intelligence, the intelligence quiescent in the soul and its self-knowledge.”

But the last rung is not like the others. He who stands beyond the intelligent will is not a fourth and subtler faculty of Nature; he is the Purusha, the conscious Self, for whom all the instruments exist and in whose light alone they see. Here the science of the instruments passes into the knowledge of the soul. The next verse draws the consequence: awakening by the understanding to the Highest which is beyond even the discerning mind, putting force on the self by the self to make it firm and still, slay this enemy in the form of desire 3·43. The intelligence is given a double work. It must first turn round, ceasing to look downward and outward into the whirl of objects and looking upward and inward to that which exceeds it; and then, fixed in that seeing, it becomes the lever by which the lower nature is held firm while desire is slain. The stair is climbed not by the violence of the lower members against one another, but by the light of the higher descending to hold each lower power in its place.

It is significant that the Gita never asks for the senses to be destroyed or the mind to be abolished. It asks that each be set under its rightful master. The liberated man still ranges over the objects with the senses; only now the senses are subject to the self, freed from liking and disliking, and there settles upon him that large and sweet clearness of soul and temperament in which passion and grief find no place 2·64. The Gita’s word for it is prasāda, a clear and gracious tranquillity. The ascent is not an escape from the instruments. It is their restoration to order.

kāma

Desire and Its Seat

Arjuna asks the question that every seeker asks at last: what is it in us that drives a man to sin as if by force, even against his own struggling will 3·36? Krishna’s answer is the most exact diagnosis in the Gita. It is desire, and wrath its companion, children of rajas, all-devouring, the soul’s great enemy 3·37. As a fire is covered by smoke and a mirror by dust, so knowledge is covered by this insatiable fire 3·38–39. Then comes the decisive statement: the senses, mind and intellect are its seat; enveloping knowledge by these, it bewilders the embodied soul 3·40. Desire is not lodged in one corner of the being where it might be isolated and cut away. It has made its dwelling in the very instruments of knowledge, in sense and mind and even in the buddhi, and it uses them to veil from the soul the truth that would free it.

The second chapter had already traced the steps of its working with a precision that has never been surpassed 2·62–63, and Sri Aurobindo, following the verse, shows where the fall truly lies.

By that attachment comes, by attachment desire, by desire distress, passion and anger when the desire is not satisfied or is thwarted or opposed, and by passion the soul is obscured, the intelligence and will forget to see and be seated in the calm observing soul; there is a fall from the memory of one’s true self, and by that lapse the intelligent will is also obscured, destroyed even… we become passion, wrath, grief and cease to be self and intelligence and will.

What is described here is not first a moral lapse; it is a failure of consciousness. The mind dwells upon an object; interest becomes attachment; attachment becomes desire; desire thwarted becomes anger; anger clouds the understanding; and then comes smṛtibhraṃśa, the loss of memory, which is not the forgetting of some fact but the forgetting of oneself. The intelligent will, which lives only so long as it remembers the soul it serves, vanishes into the passion it was meant to master. Such of the roving senses as the mind follows, the Gita says, carries away the understanding as the winds carry away a ship upon the sea 2·67. Let us keep this word smṛti in mind, for the Gita keeps it; the whole drama of Arjuna closes when he can say that memory has been regained.

Yet there is a deeper note in Sri Aurobindo’s reading which forbids us to treat desire as a mere evil to be crushed. In his chapter on the Field he calls pleasure and pain “the vital or sensational deformations given by the lower energy to the spontaneous Ananda or delight of the spirit when brought into contact with her workings.” Desire is a perverted delight, as it is a perverted will. What it seeks outwardly and by possession is in truth the joy of the Self, which needs no object and which no loss can touch. This is why the Gita’s remedy is never a mere suppression. Abstention from the objects, it says, leaves the rasa, the inner relish, untouched; the rasa also ceases only when the Supreme is seen 2·59. Desire is not starved out of the being. It is outshone.

vyavasāyātmikā buddhiḥ

The Purification of the Intelligence

If desire has its seat in the buddhi as well as in mind and sense, then the purification of the intelligence is the pivot of the whole work, and it is exactly there that the Gita begins its practical teaching. Before it speaks of devotion, before it unveils the Lord, it enjoins the Yoga of the buddhi. There are, it says, two kinds of intelligence in man. One is resolute and concentrated, one and homogeneous; the other is many-branching and endless, running in a hundred directions after the desires that life holds out to it 2·41. The difference is not in the first place a difference of ideas but of will. The dissipated intelligence may be brilliant, learned, even devout; the Gita’s portrait of those who delight in the flowery word, souls of desire seeking enjoyment and lordship, is the portrait of a cultivated and religious mind 2·44. But it is not established in the Self, and therefore it can never be still.

The purified buddhi, then, is not one that knows more but one that is turned otherwise, its whole orientation changed from downward and outward to upward and inward. At the close of the Gita the same teaching returns in the language of the three modes of Nature. The sattwic understanding sees what binds the spirit of man and what sets it free; the rajasic knows awry the right and the wrong; the tamasic, enveloped in darkness, takes what is not the law for the law and sees all things in a cloud of misconceptions 18·30–32. Arjuna’s intelligence at the opening of the Gita is the second kind wearing the robes of the first: noble, conscientious, eloquent, and yet knowing awry, because what reasoned in him was grief.

And here the Gita makes a claim that sets it apart from every merely rational discipline: the intelligence cannot perfectly purify itself by its own act. Sri Aurobindo is explicit that this mastery “cannot be done perfectly by the act of the intelligence itself, by a merely mental self-discipline; it can only be done by Yoga with something which is higher than itself and in which calm and self-mastery are inherent.” That is why Krishna, having commanded the control of the senses, adds three quiet words which, as Sri Aurobindo observes, hold in seed the whole secret yet to be unfolded: yukta āsīta matparaḥ, he must sit firm in Yoga, wholly given up to Me 2·61. The cleansing of the buddhi is finally not a technique but a relation. The intelligence becomes clear when it is turned towards Him, and it becomes one when it has one Object.

samatva

Equality, the Stuff of the Nature

The sign that the intelligent will has found its seat is equality. Fixed in Yoga do thy actions, having abandoned attachment, having become equal in failure and success; for it is equality that is meant by Yoga 2·48. Equality is easily mistaken for a guarded neutrality of the nerves, a coolness that keeps life at arm’s length. The Gita’s samatā is something far greater. It is the reflection, in the temperament, of the soul’s knowledge of the One.

Such is the intimate union between knowledge and equality; knowledge here in the buddhi reflected as equality in the temperament; above, on a higher plane of consciousness, knowledge as the light of the Being, equality as the stuff of the Nature.

Sri Aurobindo distinguishes the ascending forms of this poise with great delicacy: the Stoic’s equality founded on heroic endurance, the philosopher’s founded on a high intellectual indifference, the devotee’s founded on resignation to the will of God. The Gita takes up all three into its upward movement, but gives to each a profounder root, for its own equality is founded upon oneness with all beings. The sage of settled understanding is untroubled amid sorrows and without longing amid pleasures, and from him liking and fear and wrath have passed away 2·56; yet this is not a withdrawal from men but the condition of an equal eye that sees the learned Brahmin and the outcaste, the cow, the elephant and the dog, as the one Brahman 5·18–19.

In the language of our science, equality is the state in which the instruments no longer react on their own account. The senses still receive their touches; the mind still registers the shock of joy and grief; but these movements no longer seize the buddhi and carry it away, because the buddhi is now seated in something the touches cannot reach. “Equality is the sign and also for the aspirant the test.” Wherever it fails, some unequal play of the modes of Nature, some motion of desire, is at work below. Wherever it is present, the being becomes like the sea of the Gita’s great image.

आपूर्यमाणमचलप्रतिष्ठं समुद्रमापः प्रविशन्ति यद्वत् ।तद्वत्कामा यं प्रविशन्ति सर्वे स शान्तिमाप्नोति न कामकामी ॥

āpūryamāṇamacalapratiṣṭhaṃsamudramāpaḥ praviśanti yadvattadvatkāmā yaṃ praviśanti sarvesa śāntimāpnoti na kāmakāmī

The image is not of emptiness but of plenitude. The rivers still flow in, all the waters of the world’s contacts; they are neither dammed nor refused. But the ocean does not rise and fall with their coming, because its fullness is its own. Equality is the ocean’s poise, and the secret of that poise is a delight that depends on nothing that enters it.

hṛddeśe tiṣṭhati

The Heart Where the Lord Is Seated

The ascent of the third chapter leads beyond the intelligence to the Self. But the Gita does not leave the Self as a silent summit above the instruments. As the teaching deepens, he who is beyond the buddhi is revealed not only as the witness above but as the Lord within, and his seat is named with a startling intimacy: not the head, not the reason, but the heart.

ईश्वरः सर्वभूतानां हृद्देशेऽर्जुन तिष्ठति ।भ्रामयन्सर्वभूतानि यन्त्रारूढानि मायया ॥

īśvaraḥ sarvabhūtānāṃ hṛddeśe’rjuna tiṣṭhatibhrāmayansarvabhūtāni yantrārūḍhāni māyayā

Hṛddeśe, in the region of the heart. All through the ignorance it is this indwelling Lord who has turned the creature, as if mounted on a machine, by the Maya of the lower nature; Sri Aurobindo calls this secret working “God’s universal method with creatures.” And the same Lord declares elsewhere: I am lodged in the heart of all; from Me are memory and knowledge and their absence 15·15. Memory is from Him. The smṛti whose loss destroyed the intelligence in the second chapter has its fountain here, in the heart where He is seated, and it can only be regained by turning there.

The heart of which the Gita speaks is not the emotional mind with its attachments. That heart wept at Kurukshetra and was part of the bankruptcy. It is the secret heart behind it, the cavern where, as Sri Aurobindo recalls, the Veda too placed the seat of the Truth. Nor is its demand a lesser thing than the demands of knowledge and will.

The mind of knowledge and the will of action are not all; there is within you a heart whose demand is for delight. Here too in the heart’s power and illumination, in its demand for delight, for the soul’s satisfaction your nature must be turned, transformed and lifted to one conscious ecstasy with the Divine.

In one of his letters on the Karmayoga of the Gita, Sri Aurobindo describes how this inner presence emerges as the works are given. The one who acts begins to feel the action taken from him and done by a Power behind, and something in the depths awakens that was always there.

one feels all one’s works taken from one and done by the universal or supreme Mother or by the Divine Power controlling and acting from behind the heart. By constant referring of all one’s will and works to the Divine, love and adoration grow, the psychic being comes forward.

So the science of the instruments finds a second axis. The ladder of 3·42 rises; the heart deepens. Knowledge climbs to the Self above the intelligence; love and self-offering go inward to the Lord behind the heart; and in the end the two are found to be one Being, the Purushottama, who is at once the silent Self beyond the buddhi and the Friend seated within. This is why the Gita, which began with the Yoga of the intelligent will, ends with a call to the whole being: in Him take refuge in every way of thy being, sarvabhāvena, and by His grace thou shalt come to the supreme peace 18·62. The prasāda that was a clear tranquillity of the temperament in the second chapter has become, in the eighteenth, the grace of the Lord.

smṛtir labdhā

From Crisis to Liberated Action

Now the shape of the whole science can be seen. Its final prescription joins the two axes in a single verse: giving up all works into Me, resorting to the Yoga of the will and intelligence, be always one in heart and consciousness with Me 18·57. The buddhiyoga of the second chapter is not abandoned at the summit; it is gathered into the heart’s union. And then, beyond all rules and all dharmas, the supreme word: abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone; I will deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve 18·66. This surrender is not a collapse of the instruments, a second fainting on the chariot-seat. It is their integration around the centre whose absence had been the whole cause of their disorder.

For then, when we enter into that inmost self of our existence, we come to know that in us and in all is the one Spirit and Godhead whom all Nature serves and manifests and we ourselves are soul of this Soul, spirit of this Spirit, our body his delegated image, our life a movement of the rhythm of his life, our mind a sheath of his consciousness, our senses his instruments, our emotions and sensations the seekings of his delight of being, our actions a means of his purpose…

Set this beside the opening crisis and the correspondence is complete. The body that trembled is now His delegated image; the senses that rushed out to their objects are His instruments; the emotions that cried for their own are the seekings of His delight; the will that sank down is the means of His purpose. Nothing has been cut away. Everything has been given back to its Master.

And Arjuna’s last words answer, one by one, the failures of the instrument. Naṣṭo mohaḥ: the bewilderment of the second chapter, the sammoha from which memory fell, is destroyed. Smṛtir labdhā: memory is regained, not of a doctrine but of the Self, and it is regained, he says, through Thy grace, tvatprasādāt. Sthito’smi: I stand firm, as the man of settled understanding stands. Gatasandehaḥ: the many-branching intelligence has become one. Kariṣye vacanaṃ tava: the will, which had resolved on its own account that it would not fight, now gives itself 18·73. The instruments are all still present. The same senses see the same armies; the same mind must reckon the same battle. But they are instruments now, and the one who holds the reins is known.

The Stair of the Instruments and What Stands Beyond Them

The Gita’s science of consciousness ends where every true science of the soul must end, in a being who is at once more himself and less his own. It began with a man whose every part had fallen away from its centre and who therefore could not act; it closes with a man whose every part has found its centre, and who therefore can act without bondage. Between the two lies the long, patient work that the Gita never hurries: the senses drawn in like the tortoise’s limbs, the sense-mind stilled, desire unmasked in its very seat, the intelligence turned upward and made one, equality settling on the temperament like the calm of a full sea, and at last the discovery, behind the heart that grieved, of the Heart that was never troubled.

We may remember, then, the name by which the charioteer is called in the moment of his smile 2·10. Hrishikesha, Lord of the senses, sat in the driver’s place from the first blast of the conches 1·15 to the last word; the reins of the instruments were in His hands even while the warrior sank weeping on the chariot-seat. The whole science of the Gita is the slow discovery of that fact, and its whole delight is the moment when the discovery is complete, when the soul, looking up from the fallen bow, sees who has been driving.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 1

1. 28–30

Chapter 2

1. 7

Chapter 3

1. 27
2. 42
3. 43
4. 40

Chapter 2

1. 62–63
2. 59
3. 41
4. 61
5. 48
6. 70

Chapter 15

1. 15

Chapter 18

1. 61
2. 62
3. 57
4. 66
5. 73

• The Human Disciple
• Sankhya and Yoga
• The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
• Equality
• The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood
• Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta
• The Field and its Knower
• The Supreme Secret
• The Message of the Gita