The thirteenth chapter begins the final movement by asking for a more exact knowledge of Nature and soul. The body with its mind, senses, desire and aversion, pleasure and pain, the whole organised aggregate of becoming, is the field, the kshetra; the conscious being who observes and experiences within it is the knower of the field, the kshetrajna. Krishna then adds the decisive enlargement: he himself is the Knower of the field in all fields (13·3). The individual consciousness is fulfilled only by discovering the one supreme Consciousness present in every being.
Sri Aurobindo sees this as a necessary clarification after the middle chapters. The seeker has learned to offer works to the Divine and to love the Lord in all, and must now understand the inner mechanism of bondage and of liberation. The field is not the self; the movements of Nature are not the whole truth of the soul. Yet the field is far from meaningless, for it is the appointed place in which the soul experiences, evolves, discriminates and rises.
Krishna gives a list of what he calls knowledge, but it is strikingly ethical and spiritual rather than intellectual: humility and sincerity, harmlessness, patience and candour, self-control and dispassion, the absence of egoism, a clear perception of the suffering and defect inherent in birth and death, non-attachment, an unwavering devotion, the love of solitude and a constant turning to spiritual truth (13·9). Sri Aurobindo’s reading explains the surprise: true knowledge is not information stored in the mind but a change of the whole consciousness that prepares the soul to see rightly.
The object of this knowledge is the beginningless Brahman, said to be neither being nor non-being, yet everywhere present. It has its hands and feet on every side, its eyes and heads and faces everywhere; it pervades and upholds all and yet remains unattached; it is within all and without, unmoving and yet moving, subtle beyond knowing, far off and yet close at hand (13·14). The language strains the reason on purpose, for the Divine Reality exceeds all our fixed oppositions.
The chapter then distinguishes Prakriti and Purusha. Nature is the cause of the instruments, the qualities and the works; the Purusha, seated in Nature, is the experiencer of her pleasure and pain. But the supreme Purusha is the witness, the giver of sanction, the upholder, the enjoyer, the mighty Lord and the highest Self (13·23). Bondage comes from the soul’s attachment to the gunas; liberation comes from discerning this difference and from seeing the one Lord seated equally in all that lives (13·28).
The thirteenth chapter thus lays the contemplative foundation for the final synthesis. The soul must know the field without being imprisoned in it, know Nature without being bound by her, know the individual knower without missing the supreme Knower in all. Seeing the same Divine in every being, it ceases to wound itself by separative action and becomes fit for the highest movement of the Spirit.
