तस्मात्सर्वेषु कालेषु मामनुस्मर युध्य च ।मय्यर्पितमनोबुद्धिर् मामेवैष्यस्यसंशयम् ॥
tasmātsarveṣu kāleṣu māmanusmara yudhya camayyarpitamanobuddhir māmevaiṣyasyasaṁśayam
Therefore at all times remember Me and fight; for if thy mind and thy understanding are always fixed on and given up to Me, to Me thou shalt surely come.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
Essays on the Gita
Remember me and fight,
The equality which the Gita preaches is not disinterestedness, — the great command to Arjuna given after the foundation and main structure of the teaching have been laid and built,11·33 “Arise, slay thy enemies, enjoy a prosperous kingdom,” has not the ring of an uncompromising altruism or of a white, dispassionate abnegation; it is a state of inner poise and wideness which4·42 is the foundation of spiritual freedom. With that poise, in that freedom we have to do the “work that is to be done,” a phrase8·7 which the Gita uses with the greatest wideness including in it all11·33 works, sarvakarmāṇi, and which far exceeds, though it may include, social duties or ethical obligations. What is the work to be done is not to be determined by the individual choice; nor is the right to the action and the rejection of claim to the fruit the great word of the Gita, but only a preliminary word governing the first state of the disciple when he begins ascending the hill of Yoga. It is practically superseded at a subsequent stage. For the Gita goes on to affirm emphatically that the man is not the doer of the action; it is Prakriti, it is Nature, it is the great Force with its three modes of action that works through him, and he must learn to see that it is not he who does the work. Therefore the “right to action” is an idea which is only valid so long as we are still under2·47 the illusion of being the doer; it must necessarily disappear from the mind like the claim to the fruit, as soon as we cease to be to our own consciousness the doer of our works. All pragmatic egoism, whether of the claim to fruits or of the right to action, is then at an end.
The Gita here lays a great stress on the thought and state of mind at the time of death, a stress which will with difficulty be understood if we do not recognise what may be called the self-creative power of the consciousness. What the thought, the inner regard, the faith, śraddhā, settles itself upon with a complete and definite insistence, into that our inner being tends to change. This tendency becomes a decisive force when we go to those higher spiritual and self-evolved experiences which are less dependent on external things than is our ordinary psychology, enslaved as that is to outward Nature. There we can see ourselves steadily becoming that on which we keep our minds fixed and to which we constantly aspire. Therefore there any lapse of the thought, any infidelity of the memory means always a retardation of the change or some fall in its process and a going back towards what we were before,—at least so long as we have not substantially and irrevocably fixed our new becoming. When we have done that, when we have made it normal to our experience, the memory of it remains self-existently because that now is the natural form of our consciousness. In the critical moment of passing from the mortal plane of living, the importance of our then state of consciousness becomes evident. But it is not a deathbed remembrance at variance with or insufficiently prepared by the whole tenor of our life and our past subjectivity that can have this saving power. The thought of the Gita here is not on a par with the indulgences and facilities of popular religion; it has nothing in common with the crude fancies that make the absolution and last unction of the priest, an edifying “Christian” death after an unedifying profane life or the precaution or accident of a death in sacred Benares or holy Ganges a sufficient machinery of salvation. The divine subjective becoming on which the mind has to be fixed firmly in the moment of the physical8·6 death, yaṁ smaran bhāvaṁ tyajati ante kalevaram, must have been one into which the soul was at each moment growing inwardly during the physical life, sadā tad-bhāva-bhāvitaḥ. “Therefore,” says the divine Teacher, “at all times remember me and8·7–10 fight; for if thy mind and thy understanding are always fixed on and given up to Me, mayi arpita-mano-buddhiḥ, to Me thou shalt surely come. For it is by thinking always of him with a consciousness united with him in an undeviating Yoga of constant practice that one comes to the divine and supreme Purusha.”
The Gita describes the last state of the mind of the Yogin in which he passes from life through death to this supreme divine existence. A motionless mind, a soul armed with the strength of Yoga, a union with God in bhakti, — the union by love is not8·10–13 here superseded by the featureless unification through knowledge, it remains to the end a part of the supreme force of the Yoga, — and the life-force entirely drawn up and set between the brows in the seat of mystic vision. All the doors of the sense are closed, the mind is shut in into the heart, the life-force taken up out of its diffused movement into the head, the intelligence concentrated in the utterance of the sacred syllable OM and its conceptive thought in the remembrance of the supreme Godhead, mām anusmaran. That is the established Yogic way of going, a last offering up of the whole being to the Eternal, the Transcendent. But still that is only a process; the essential condition is the constant undeviating memory of the Divine in life, even in action and battle — mām anusmara yudhya ca — and the turning of the whole act of living into an uninterrupted Yoga, nitya-yoga. Whoever does that, finds Me easy to attain, says the Godhead; he is the great soul who reaches the supreme perfection.
For that is after all the essential, to make the whole being one with the Divine, so entirely and in all ways one as to be naturally and constantly fixed in union, and thus to make all living, not only thought and meditation, but action, labour, battle, a remembering of God. “Remember me and fight,”8·7 means not to lose the ever-present thought of the Eternal for one single moment in the clash of the temporal which normally absorbs our minds, and that seems sufficiently difficult, almost impossible. It is entirely possible indeed only if the other conditions are satisfied. If we have become in our consciousness one self with all, one self which is always to our thought the Divine, and even our eyes and our other senses see and sense the Divine Being everywhere so that it is impossible for us at any time at all to feel or think of anything as that merely which the unenlightened sense perceives, but only as the Godhead at once concealed and manifested in that form, and if our will is one in consciousness with a supreme will and every act of will, of mind, of body is felt to come from it, to be its movement, instinct with it or identical, then what the Gita demands can be integrally done. The remembrance of the Divine Being becomes no longer an intermittent act of the mind, but the natural condition of our activities and in a way the very substance of the consciousness. The Jiva has become possessed of its right and natural, its spiritual relation to the Purushottama and all our life is a Yoga, an accomplished and yet an eternally self-accomplishing oneness.
The highest way appointed for him is to carry out the will11·33 of God without egoism, as the human occasion and instrument of that which he sees to be decreed, with the constant supporting8·7 memory of the Godhead in himself and man, mām anusmaran, and in whatever ways are appointed for him by the Lord of his11·33 Nature. Nimittamātraṁ bhava savyasācin. He will not cherish personal enmity, anger, hatred, egoistic desire and passion, will not hasten towards strife or lust after violence and destruction3·20 like the fierce Asura, but he will do his work, lokasaṅgrahāya. Beyond the action he will look towards that to which it leads, that for which he is warring. For God the Time-Spirit does not destroy for the sake of destruction, but to make the ways clear in the cyclic process for a greater rule and a progressing manifestation,11·33 rājyaṁ samṛddham. He will accept in its deeper sense, which the superficial mind does not see, the greatness of the struggle, the glory of the victory,—if need be, the glory of the victory which comes masked as defeat,—and lead man too in the enjoyment of his opulent kingdom. Not appalled by the face of the Destroyer, he will see within it the eternal Spirit imperishable in all these perishing bodies and behind it the face of the Charioteer, the Leader of man, the Friend of all creatures, suhṛdaṁ sarvabhūtānām. This formidable World-Form once seen5·29 and acknowledged, it is to that reassuring truth that the rest of the chapter is directed; it discloses in the end a more intimate face and body of the Eternal.
Other writings
Our contemporary does not understand why we wrote of God and the universal force or why we insisted on the special manifestation of the Divine Force as opposed to its veiled workings through human egoism. We did so because we had to oppose the excess of that very egoism. We have not risen to the heights of Monism from…Read the whole passage · 614 wordsClose the passage
Our contemporary does not understand why we wrote of God and the universal force or why we insisted on the special manifestation of the Divine Force as opposed to its veiled workings through human egoism. We did so because we had to oppose the excess of that very egoism. We have not risen to the heights of Monism from which he scoffs benignly at our dualism. It may be the final truth that there is nothing but God, but for the purposes of life we have to recognise that there is a dualism in the underlying unity. It profits nothing to say, for instance, “The Divine Force wrote two columns of Facts and Comments the other day in the Bengalee.” God reveals Himself not only in the individual where He is veiled by ignorance and egoism, but in Himself. When the Bengalee sees no alternative to man’s self-conscious action except unconscious action, it is under the influence of European materialism which sees only conscious creatures in an unconscious inanimate Nature. The Divine Force is not unconscious but conscious and intelligent and to see Him as a conscious power only in men is to deny Him altogether. When again our contemporary uses a misapplication of the truth of Adwaita to justify the deifying of his own reason, he is encouraging practical atheism while taking the divine name in vain. God manifests Himself in everything, He manifests Himself in our reason, therefore let us forget God and rely on our own human calculations. That is the train of argument. What is the use of relying on God? let us look to our own safety. What is the use of being brave in the hour of peril? If our leader goes, the movement stops. Mam anusmara yudhya cha, is the motto of the Karmayogin. God manifests Himself in the individual partially, but He stands behind the progress of the world wholly. We are bound to use our own intellects, we cannot help it if we would, but we must remember that it is a limited intellect and be prepared for the failure of our schemes and plans, for calamity, for defeat, without making these things an excuse for abandoning His work, laying our principles on the shelf or sending out a cry to discourage steadfastness and self-sacrifice. Our plans may fail, God’s purpose cannot. That is why we laid so much stress on the fact that this has been a movement which, as the man in the street would say, has led itself, in which individuals have been instruments and not the real shapers and leaders. We have faith and we believe in the great rule of life in the Gita, “Remember me and fight.” We believe in the mighty word of assurance to the bhakta, Macchittah sarvadurgani matprasadat tarishyasi, “If thou reposest thy heart and mind in Me by My grace thou shalt pass safe through all difficulties and dangers.” We believe that the Yoga of the Gita will play a large part in the uplifting of the nation, and this attitude is the first condition of the Yoga of the Gita. When anybody tries to discourage our people in this attitude, we are bound to enter the lists against him. We recognise that to argue with those who have only opinions but no realisation is a hopeless task, since it is only by entering into communion with the Infinite and seeing the Divine Force in all that one can be intellectually sure of its conscious action. But at least we can try to remove the philosophical delusions and confusions which mislead men from the right path and veil European materialism under generalities drawn from Vedanta.
It is an error, we repeat, to think that spirituality is a thing divorced from life. “Abandon all” says the Isha Upanishad “that thou mayst enjoy all, neither covet any man’s possession. But verily do thy deeds in this world and wish to live thy hundred years; no other way is given thee than this to escape the bondage of thy acts.” It is an error to think that the heights of religion are above the struggles of this world. The recurrent cry of Sri Krishna to Arjuna insists on the struggle; “Fight and overthrow thy opponents!” “Remember me and fight!” “Give up all thy works to me with a heart full of spirituality, and free from craving, free from selfish claims, fight! let the fever of thy soul pass from thee.” It is an error to imagine that even when the religious man does not give up his ordinary activities, he yet becomes too sattwic, too saintly, too loving or too passionless for the rough work of the world. Nothing can be more extreme and uncompromising than the reply of the Gita in the opposite sense, “Whosoever has his temperament purged from egoism, whosoever suffers not his soul to receive the impress of the deed, though he slay the whole world yet he slays not and is not bound.” The Charioteer of Kurukshetra driving the car of Arjuna over that field of ruin is the image and description of Karmayoga; for the body is the chariot and the senses are the horses of the driving and it is through the bloodstained and mire-sunk ways of the world that Sri Krishna pilots the soul of man to Vaicuntha.
