भक्त्या मामभिजानाति यावान्यश्चास्मि तत्त्वतः ।ततो मां तत्त्वतो ज्ञात्वा विशते तदनन्तरम् ॥
bhaktyā māmabhijānāti yāvānyaścāsmi tattvataḥtato māṁ tattvato jñātvā viśate tadanantaram
By devotion he comes to know Me, who and how much I am and in all the reality and principles of my being; having thus known Me he entereth into That (Purushottama).
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
AI translation
Essays on the Gita
There is an intermediary idea, a more mystical view of Avatarhood which supposes that a human soul calls down this descent into himself and is either possessed by the divine consciousness or becomes an effective reflection or channel of it. This view rests upon certain truths of spiritual experience. The divine birth in man, his ascent, is itself a growing of the human into the divine consciousness, and in its intensest culmination is a losing of the separate self in that. The soul merges its individuality in an infinite and universal being or loses it in the heights of a transcendent being; it becomes one with the Self, the Brahman, the Divine or, as it is sometimes more absolutely put, becomes the one Self, the Brahman, the Divine. The Gita itself speaks of the soul becoming the Brahman, brahmabhūta, and of its thereby dwelling in the Lord, in Krishna,18·53–56 but it does not, it must be marked, speak of it as becoming the Lord or the Purushottama, though it does declare that the Jiva himself is always Ishwara, the partial being of the Lord, mamaivāṁśaḥ. For this greatest union, this highest becoming is15·7 still part of the ascent; while it is the divine birth to which every Jiva arrives, it is not the descent of the Godhead, not Avatarhood, but at most Buddhahood according to the doctrine of the Buddhists, it is the soul awakened from its present mundane individuality into an infinite superconsciousness. That need not carry with it either the inner consciousness or the characteristic action of the Avatar.
And first the Gita restates the body of its message. It summarises18·49–63 the whole outline and essence in the short space of fifteen verses, lines of a brief and concentrated expression and significance that miss nothing of the kernel of the matter, couched in phrases of the most lucid precision and clearness. And they must therefore be scanned with care, must be read deeply in the light of all that has gone before, because here it is evidently intended to extract what the Gita itself considers to be the central sense of its own teaching. The statement sets out from the original starting-point of the thought in the book, the enigma of human action, the apparently insuperable difficulty of living in the highest self and spirit while yet we continue to do the works of the world. The easiest way is to give up the problem as insoluble, life and action as an illusion or an inferior movement of existence to be abandoned as soon as we can rise out of the snare of the world into the truth of spiritual being. That is the ascetic solution, if it can be called a solution; at any rate it is a decisive and effective way out of the enigma, a way to which ancient Indian thought of the highest and most meditative kind, as soon as it commenced to turn at a sharp incline from its first large and free synthesis, had moved with an always increasing preponderance. The Gita like the Tantra and on certain sides the later religions attempts to preserve the ancient balance: it maintains the substance and foundation of the original synthesis, but the form has been changed and renovated in the light of a developing spiritual experience. This teaching does not evade the difficult problem of reconciling the full active life of man with the inner life in the highest self and spirit; it advances what it holds to be the real solution. It does not at all deny the efficacy of the ascetic renunciation of life for its own purpose, but it sees that that cuts instead of loosening the knot of the riddle and therefore it accounts it an inferior method and holds its own for the better way. The two paths both lead us out of the lower ignorant normal nature of man to the pure spiritual consciousness and so far both must be held to be valid and even one in essence: but where one stops short and turns back, the other advances with a firm subtlety and high courage, opens a gate on unexplored vistas, completes man in God and unites and reconciles in the spirit soul and Nature.
This knowledge comes, says the Gita, by a highest bhakti. It is attained when the mind exceeds itself by a supramental and high spiritual seeing of things and when the heart too rises in unison beyond our more ignorant mental forms of love and devotion to a love that is calm and deep and luminous with widest knowledge, to a supreme delight in God and an illimitable adoration, the unperturbed ecstasy, the spiritual Ananda. When the soul has lost its separative personality, when it has become the Brahman, it is then that it can live in the true Person and can attain to the supreme revealing bhakti for the Purushottama and can come to know him utterly by the power of its profound bhakti, its heart’s knowledge, bhaktyā mām abhijānāti. That is the integral knowledge, when the heart’s fathomless vision completes the mind’s absolute experience,—samagraṁ māṁ jñātvā. “He comes to know Me,” says the Gita, “who and how much I am and in all the reality and principles of my being, yāvān yaś cāsmi tattvataḥ.” This integral knowledge is the knowledge of the Divine present in the individual; it is the entire experience of the Lord secret in the heart of man, revealed now as the supreme Self of his existence, the Sun of all his illumined consciousness, the Master and Power of all his works, the divine Fountain of all his soul’s love and delight, the Lover and Beloved of his worship and adoration. It is the knowledge too of the Divine extended in the universe, of the Eternal from whom all proceeds and in whom all lives and has its being, of the Self and Spirit of the cosmos, of Vasudeva who has become all this that is, of the Lord of cosmic existence who reigns over the works of Nature. It is the knowledge of the divine Purusha luminous in his transcendent eternity, the form of whose being escapes from the thought of the mind but not from its silence; it is the entire living experience of him as absolute Self, supreme Brahman, supreme Soul, supreme Godhead: for that seemingly incommunicable Absolute is at the same time and even in that highest status the originating Spirit of the cosmic action and Lord of all these existences. The soul of the liberated man thus enters by a reconciling knowledge, penetrates by a perfect simultaneous delight of the transcendent Divine, of the Divine in the individual and of the Divine in the universe into the Purushottama, māṁ viśate tadanantaram. He becomes one with him in his self-knowledge and self-experience, one with him in his being and consciousness and will and world-knowledge and world-impulse, one with him in the universe and in his unity with all creatures in the universe and one with him beyond world and individual in the transcendence of the eternal Infinite, śāśvataṁ padam avyayam. This is the culmination of the supreme bhakti that is at the core of the supreme knowledge.18·55, 18·55, 18·55, 18·56
Thus these eight verses carefully read in the light of the knowledge already given by the Teacher are a brief, but still a comprehensive indication of the whole essential idea, the entire central method, all the kernel of the complete Yoga of the Gita.18·49–56
The Synthesis of Yoga
Love fulfilled does not exclude knowledge, but itself brings knowledge; and the completer the knowledge, the richer the possibility of love. “By Bhakti” says the Lord in the Gita “shall a man know Me in all my extent and greatness and as I am in the principles of my being, and when he has known Me in the principles of my being, then he enters into Me.” Love without knowledge is a passionate and intense, but blind, crude, often dangerous thing, a great power, but also a stumbling-block; love, limited in knowledge, condemns itself in its fervour and often by its very fervour to narrowness; but love leading to perfect knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. Such love is not inconsistent with, but rather throws itself with joy into divine works; for it loves God and is one with him in all his being, and therefore in all beings, and to work for the world is then to feel and fulfil multitudinously one’s love for God. This is the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start on our journey by the path of devotion with Love for the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of the divine delight of the All-Lover’s being the fulfilment of ours, its secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its universal radiation.
Evening talks
The Upanishads speak of “Him by knowing whom all is known.” What does it mean? That _vijñāna_ is not merely the fundamental realisation of the One. It means the knowledge of the principles of the Divine Being, what Krishna speaks of as _tattvataḥ._ One cannot know the complete Divine except in the Supermind. That is why Krishna said that one who knows him in the “true principles of his being” is rare, _kaścit._ The Upanishads also speak of the Brahman as _catuṣpada_ — having four feet or aspects. They do not merely state “All is the Brahman” and it is over. The realisation of the Self is not all. There are many things beyond that. The Divine Guide within me urged me to proceed, adding experience after experience, reaching higher and higher, stopping at none as final, till I arrived at a glimpse of the Supermind. There I found the Truth indivisible and there everything takes its proper place. There, Nirguna and Saguna — Impersonality and Personality — don’t exist. They are all aspects of One Truth which is indivisible.
Shankara is right and so also are Madhwa and Nimbarka. Only, when they state their truths in mental terms there is a tremendous confusion. Shankara says, “Duality does not exist and all is one.” Madhwa says, “There is duality.” Nimbarka says, “There is Bheda-bheda, there is duality and division as well as no division.” The Upanishad speaks of Him by knowing whom all is known. What does that mean? This knowledge, this Vijnana, does not mean merely the fundamental realisation of the One. It means the knowledge of the principle of the Divine Being, what Krishna speaks of as Janati tattwata. One cannot know the complete Divine except in what I have called the Supermind. That’s why Krishna said of himself that one who knows him in the true principles of his being is rare. The Upanishads also speak of the Brahman as Chatushpada, having four feet or aspects. They don’t just state that all is Brahman and end there. The realisation of the Self is not all. There are many things beyond that. The Divine Guide within urged me to proceed, adding experience after experience, reaching higher and higher, stopping at none as the final, till I arrived at the Supermind. There I found the Truth indivisible and there everything takes its proper place. There Nirguna and Saguna, impersonality and personality, don’t exist. They are all aspects of one Truth which cannot be divided.
