श्रीमद्भगवद्गीताBhagavad Gītā · in the light of Sri Aurobindo, home

← The Mother on the Gita

WritingThe Delight of Krishna

Line of Karamyoga laid down by the Gita

Sri Aurobindo

The greatest gospel of spiritual works eyer yet given to the race, the most perfect system of Karmayoga known to man in the past, is to be found in the Bhagavad Gita. In that famous episode of the Mahabharata the great basic lines of Karmayoga are laid down for all time with an incomparable mastery and the infallible eye of an assured experience. It is true that the path alone, as the ancients saw it, is worked out fully: the perfect fulfillment, the highest secret (rahasyam uttamam) is hinted rather than developed; it is kept back as an unexpressed part of a supreme mystery. There are obvious reasons for this reticence; for the fulfillment is in any case a matter for experience and no teaching can express it. It cannot be described in a way that can really be understood by a mind that has not the effulgent transmuting experience. And for the soul that has passed the shining portals and stands in the blaze of the inner light, all mental and verbal description is as poor as it is superfluous, inadequate and an impertinence. All divine consummations have perforce to be figured by us in the inapt and deceptive terms of a language which was made to fit the normal experience of mental man; so expressed. they can be rightly understood only by those who already know, and, knowing, are able to a give these poor external terms a changed, inner and 3 transfigured sense. As the Vedic Rishis insisted in the 7 beginning, the words of the supreme wisdom are expressive only to those who are already of the wise. The Gita at its cryptic close may seem by its silence to stop short of that solution for which we are seeking; it pauses at the borders of the highest spiritual mind and does not cross them into the splendours of the supramental Light. And yet its secret of dynamic. and not only static, identity with the inner Presence, its highest mystery of absolute surrender to the Divine Guide, Lord and lnhabitant of our nature. is the central secret. This surrender is the indispensable means of the supramental change and, again. it is through the supramental change that the dynamic identity becomes possible. What then are the lines of Karmayoga laid down by the Gita? Its key principle, its spiritual method, can be summed up as the union of two largest and highest states or powers of consciousness, equality and oneness. The kernel of its method is an unreserved acceptance of the Divine in our life as in our inner self and spirit. An inner renunciation of personal desire leads to equality, accomplishes our total surrender to the Divine. supports a delivery from dividing ego which brings us oneness. But this must be a oneness in dynamic force and not only in static peace or inactive beatitude. The Gita promises us freedom for the spirit even in the midst of works and the full energies ofNature, if we accept subjection of our whole being to that which is higher than the separating and limiting ego. It proposes an integral dynamic activity founded on a still passivity; a largest possible action irrevocably based on an immobile calm is its secret-free expression out of a supreme inward silence.

From The Delight of Krishna · Bhagavad Gītā · in the light of Sri Aurobindo · incarnateword.in