After the overwhelming universal vision, Arjuna asks which are the greater in Yoga, those who worship the personal Divine or those who seek the unmanifest Immutable. Krishna replies with a fine balance. Both paths can attain the Supreme, but for embodied beings the way of the bare unmanifest is more difficult and toilsome, since the bodiless Absolute is hard for those who must live and act in a body. The personal relation to the Divine gives the heart, the will and the mind a concrete support and allows the whole nature to turn Godward (12·5).
Sri Aurobindo reads this chapter as the culmination of the synthesis of devotion and knowledge. Bhakti is not a lower emotionalism set against knowledge; it is the soul’s intimate movement toward the Divine known as the supreme Being, the Self of all, the Lord of works and the Beloved. The Gita does not deny the impersonal Brahman, for it includes it; but it refuses to make the impersonal silence the sole or the highest practical way for the integral human being.
Krishna then gives a graded path of marvellous compassion. Best of all is to fix the mind and heart directly upon him; if that is not yet possible, to seek him by a constant practice of concentration; if even that is too hard, to make all one’s works an offering to him; and if the soul cannot do so much, then at least to renounce the fruit of works with a self-controlled mind (12·8, 12·11). This descending sequence shows the Gita’s realism, for the divine path is high yet opens from many levels of capacity, and every step that weakens the ego and turns action toward the Divine has its value.
The second half of the chapter draws the portrait of the Bhakta who is dear to the Divine. He hates no creature and is friendly and compassionate to all; he is free from possessiveness and from the sense of ego, equal in pleasure and pain, forgiving, contented, self-governed and firm in his resolve, with mind and heart given up to the Lord (12·13). He neither troubles the world nor is troubled by it; he is without expectation, pure, capable, indifferent to outer circumstance, unmoved alike by honour and dishonour, by friend and foe, by praise and blame.
These are not moral ornaments but the very signs of a consciousness transformed by love. Devotion has become equality, self-mastery, harmlessness, universality and surrender. The twelfth chapter therefore closes the second movement by showing what kind of being can live after the vision of the World-Spirit. The Bhakta is not withdrawn from works but inwardly offered, equal and God-centred. Knowledge has found its heart, and works have found their soul.
