द्वाविमौ पुरुषौ लोके क्षरश्चाक्षर एव च ।क्षरः सर्वाणि भूतानि कूटस्थोऽक्षर उच्यते ॥
dvāvimau puruṣau loke kṣaraścākṣara eva cakṣaraḥ sarvāṇi bhūtāni kūṭastho’kṣara ucyate
There are two Purushas (spiritual beings) in this world, the immutable (and impersonal) and the mutable (and personal); the mutable is all these existences, the Kutastha (the high-seated consciousness of the Brahmic status) is called the immutable.
Gītā 15·16Thus the Divine is manifest in a double soul of his mystery, a twofold power, dvāvimau puruṣau; he supports at once the spirit of mutable things that is all these existences, kṣaraḥ sarvāṇi bhūtāni, and the immutable spirit that stands above them in his imperturbable immobility of eternal silence and calm. And it is by the force of the Divine in them that the mind and heart and will of man are so powerfully drawn in different directions by these two spirits as if by opposing and incompatible attractions one insistent to annul the other. But the Divine is neither wholly the Kshara, nor wholly the Akshara.
In Essays on the Gita Sri Aurobindo renders the term “Kshara Purusha” as “the universal Soul” . How can the “Kshara” be the universal Soul, if the one is mutable and the other immutable?
This is not my interpretation, it is what the Gita itself plainly says. It explains Kshara as “all existences” and since Purusha is the being which observes and experiences all the movements of Nature, (which is what is meant here by soul) it cannot be anything else than the universal Soul identifying itself with all existences in Nature.
Kindly indicate the relation of the universal Soul to the Divine.
The word क्षर means really mobile as opposed to the immobile immutable Akshara. The Kshara Purusha is that which follows the movement of the universe and seems to move and change, because it identifies itself while the Akshara is not identified and stands apart. The Upanishad makes the same distinction of the two Souls and Prakriti.
I used to take kṣetra and kṣara puruṣa to mean the lower nature.
Nature is Prakriti—Purusha cannot be Prakriti. Neither can Purusha be kṣetra, the field, because Purusha by its very definition is that which is behind Prakriti and its field and observes it—it is the Being not the nature.
28 November 1934
