तेषामेवानुकम्पार्थम् अहमज्ञानजं तमः ।नाशयाम्यात्मभावस्थो ज्ञानदीपेन भास्वता ॥
teṣāmevānukampārtham ahamajñānajaṁ tamaḥnāśayāmyātmabhāvastho jñānadīpena bhāsvatā
Out of compassion for them, I, lodged in their self, by the blazing lamp of knowledge destroy the darkness which is born of ignorance.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
AI translation
Mottoes of The Life Divine
I abide in the spiritual being and from there destroy the darkness born of ignorance with the shining lamp of knowledge.
Essays on the Gita
But faith is necessary; if faith is absent, if one trusts to the critical intelligence which goes by outward facts and jealously questions the revelatory knowledge because that does not square with the divisions and imperfections of the apparent nature and seems to exceed it and state something which carries us beyond the first practical facts of our present existence, its grief, its pain, evil, defect, undivine error and stumbling, aśubham, then there is no possibility of living out that greater knowledge. The soul that fails to get faith in the higher truth and law, must return into the path of ordinary mortal living subject to death and error and evil: it cannot grow into the Godhead which it denies. For this is a truth which has to be lived,—and lived in the soul’s growing light, not argued out in the mind’s darkness. One has to grow into it, one has to become it,—that is the only way to verify it. It is only by an exceeding of the lower self that one can become the real divine self and live the truth of our spiritual existence. All the apparent truths one can oppose to it are appearances of the lower Nature. The release from the evil and the defect of the lower Nature, aśubham, can only come by accepting a higher knowledge in which all this apparent evil becomes convinced of ultimate unreality, is shown to be a creation of our darkness. But to grow thus into the freedom of the divine Nature one must accept and believe in the Godhead secret within our present limited nature. For the reason why the practice of this Yoga becomes possible and easy is that in doing it we give up the whole working of all that we naturally are into the hands of that inner divine Purusha. The Godhead works out the divine birth in us progressively, simply, infallibly, by taking up our being into his and by filling it with his own knowledge and power,10·11 jñānadīpena bhāsvatā; he lays hands on our obscure ignorant nature and transforms it into his own light and wideness. What with entire faith and without egoism we believe in and impelled by him will to be, the God within will surely accomplish. But the egoistic mind and life we now and apparently are, must first surrender itself for transmutation into the hands of that inmost secret Divinity within us.
This character of the knowledge is emphasised in three separate verses of promise. “Whosoever knows me,” says the Godhead, “as the unborn who is without origin, mighty lord of the worlds and peoples, lives unbewildered among mortals10·7–11 and is delivered from all sin and evil…. Whosoever knows in its right principles this my pervading lordship and this my Yoga (the divine Yoga, aiśvara yoga, by which the Transcendent is one with all existences, even while more than them all, and dwells in them and contains them as becomings of his own Nature), unites himself to me by an untrembling Yoga…. The wise hold me for the birth of each and all, hold each and all as developing from me its action and movement, and so holding they love and adore me… and I give them the Yoga of the understanding by which they come to me and I destroy for them the darkness which is born of the ignorance.” These results must arise inevitably from the very nature of the knowledge and from the very nature of the Yoga which converts that knowledge into spiritual growth and spiritual experience. For all the perplexity of man’s mind and action, all the stumbling, insecurity and affliction of his mind, his will, his ethical turn, his emotional, sensational and vital urgings can be traced back to the groping and bewildered cognition and volition natural to his sense-obscured mortal mind in the body, sammoha. But when he sees the divine Origin of all things, when he looks steadily from the cosmic appearance to its transcendent Reality and back from that Reality to the appearance, he is then delivered from this bewilderment of the mind, will, heart and senses, he walks enlightened and free, asammūḍhaḥ martyeṣu10·3. Assigning to everything its supernal and real and not any longer only its present and apparent value, he finds the hidden links and connections; he consciously directs all life and act to their high and true object and governs them by the light and power which comes to him from the Godhead within him. Thus he escapes from the wrong cognition, the wrong mental and volitional reaction, the wrong sensational reception and impulse which here originate sin and error and suffering, sarva-pāpaiḥ pramucyate. For living thus in the transcendent and universal he sees his own and every other individuality in their greater values and is released from the falsehood and ignorance of his separative and egoistic will and knowledge. That is always the essence of the spiritual liberation.
This knowledge translated into the affective, emotional, temperamental plane becomes a calm love and intense adoration of the original and transcendental Godhead above us, the ever-present Master of all things here, God in man, God in Nature. It is at first a wisdom of the intelligence, the buddhi; but that is accompanied by a moved spiritualised state of the affective nature,* bhāva. This change of the heart and mind is the beginning of a total change of all the nature. A new inner birth and becoming prepares us for oneness with the supreme object of our love and adoration, madbhāvāya. There is an intense delight of love in the greatness and beauty and perfection of this divine Being now seen everywhere in the world and above it, prīti. That deeper ecstasy assumes the place of the scattered and external pleasure of the mind in existence or rather it draws all other delight into it and transforms by a marvellous alchemy the mind’s and the heart’s feelings and all sense movements. The whole consciousness becomes full of the Godhead and replete with his answering consciousness; the whole life flows into one sea of bliss-experience. All the speech10·9–11 and thought of such God-lovers becomes a mutual utterance and understanding of the Divine. In that one joy is concentrated all the contentment of the being, all the play and pleasure of the nature. There is a continual union from moment to moment in the thought and memory, there is an unbroken continuity of the experience of oneness in the spirit. And from the moment that this inner state begins, even in the stage of imperfection, the Divine confirms it by the perfect Yoga of the will and intelligence. He uplifts the blazing lamp of knowledge within us, he destroys the ignorance of the separative mind and will, he stands revealed in the human spirit. By the Yoga of the will and intelligence founded on an illumined union of works and knowledge the transition was effected from our lower troubled mind-ranges to the immutable calm of the witnessing Soul above the active nature. But now by this greater yoga of the Buddhi founded on an illumined union of love and adoration with an all-comprehending knowledge the soul rises in a vast ecstasy to the whole transcendental truth of the absolute and all-originating Godhead. The Eternal is fulfilled in the individual spirit and individual nature; the individual spirit is exalted from birth in time to the infinitudes of the Eternal.
- budhā bhāva-samanvitāḥ.
Mottoes of The Life Divine
I abide in the spiritual being and from there destroy the darkness born of ignorance with the shining lamp of knowledge.
Gita.*
Other writings
Each of the guṇas working on the ahaṅkāra has its particular danger for the sadhak who has made the saṅkalpa of self-surrender, but has not yet attained to the full accomplishment of the surrender. The danger of the rajoguṇa is when the sadhak is assailed by the pride that thinks, “I am a great sadhak, I have advanced so far, I am a great instrument in God’s hands,” and similar ideas, or when he attaches himself to the work as God’s work which must be carried out, putting himself into it and troubling himself about it as if he had more interest in God’s work than God himself and could manage it better. Many, while they are acting all the while in the spirit of rajasic ahaṅkāra, persuade themselves that God is working through them and they have no part in the action. This is because they are satisfied with the mere intellectual assent to the idea without waiting for the whole system and life to be full of it. A continual remembrance of God in others and renunciation of individual eagerness (spṛhā) are needed and a careful watching of our inner activities until God by the full light of self-knowledge, jñānadīpena bhāsvatā, dispels all further chance of self-delusion.
Record of Yoga
By jnana is meant that power of direct and divine knowledge which works independently of the intellect & senses or uses them only as subordinate assistants. It perceives the things that are hidden from the ordinary man, helps us to cease seeing the world in the terms of our sense experiences and enables us to become sensitive to the great unseen forces, powers, impulses & tendencies which stand behind our material life and determine and govern it. To jnana the whole machinery of the world reveals itself in its hidden principles; the nature of Purusha, the workings of Prakriti, the principles of our being, God’s purpose in His world-workings, the harmony of His gunas,—Brahman, Iswara, Atman, man & beast & object, idea & name and form, reality & relation, all these show themselves to the eye that God has illuminated with the sun of His knowledge, jnánadipena bhaswatá.
