Sri Aurobindo on the Gita

1. 1Gita’s Supreme Teaching

   This world is, as the Gita describes it, anityam asukham, so long as we live in the present world-consciousness; it is only by turning from that to the Divine and entering into the Divine Consciousness that one can possess, through the world also, the Eternal.

2. 2Gita: A Yoga of Knowledge, Devotion and Works

   The Gita cannot be described as exclusively a gospel of love. What it sets forth is a yoga of knowledge. devotion and works based on a spiritual consciousness and realisation of oneness with the Divine and of the oneness of all beings in the Divine. Bhakti, devotion and love of God carrying with it unity with all beings and love for all beings is given a high place but always in connection with knowledge and works.

3. 3Gita: A Spiritual Truth Applied to the External Life and Action

   But note that the Gita was not meant by the writer to be an allegory—you can say, if you like, that now we should dismiss the ancient war element by interpreting it as if it were an allegory. The Gita is yoga, spiritual truth applied to the external life and action—but it may be any action and not necessarily an action resembling that of the Gita. The principle of the spiritual consciousness applied to action has to be kept—the particular example used by the Gita may be treated as a thing belonging to a past world.

4. 4Demand of the Gita: Not Neutrality or Passivity but a Perfect Equality

   No doubt, hatred and cursing are not the proper attitude. It is true also that to look upon all things and all people with a calm and clear vision, to be uninvolved and impartial in one’s judgments is a quite proper yogic attitude. A condition of perfect swat; can be established in which one sees all as equal, friends and enemies included, and is not disturbed by what men do or by what happens. The question is whether this is all that is demanded from us. If so, then the general attitude will be of a neutral indifference to everything. But the Gita, which strongly insists on a perfect and absolute samata, goes on to say, “Fight, destroy the adversary, conquer.” If there is no kind of general action wanted, no loyalty to Truth as against Falsehood except for one’s personal sadhana, no will for the Truth to conquer, then the swat; of indifference will suffice. But here there is a work to be done, a Truth to be established against which immense forces are arranged, invisible forces which can use visible things and persons and actions for their instruments. If one is among the disciples, the seekers of this Truth, one has to take sides for the Truth, to stand against the forces that attack it and seek to stifle it. Arjuna wanted not to stand for either side, to refuse any action of hostility even against assailants; Sri Krishna, who insisted so much on samat5, strongly rebuked his attitude and insisted equally on his fighting the adversary. “Have samatfi,” he said “and seeing clearlythe Truth, fight.”Therefore to take sides with the Truth and to refuse to concede anything to the Falsehood that attacks, to be unflinchingly loyal and against the hostiles and the attackers, is not inconsistent with equality. It is personal and egoistic feeling that has to be thrown away; hatred and vital have to be rejected. But loyalty and refusal to compromise with the assailants and the hostiles or to daily with their ideas and demands and say, “After all we can compromise with what they ask from us”, or to accept them as companions and our own people—these things have a great importance. lithe attack were a physical menace to the work and the leaders and doers of the work, one would see this at once. But because the attack is of a subtler kind, can a passive attitude be right? It is a spiritual battle inward and outward; by neutrality and compromise or even passivity one may allow the enemyforces to pass and crush down the Truth and its children. If you look at itfrom this point, you will see that if the inner spiritual equality is right, the active loyalty and firm taking of sides is as right, and the two cannot be incompatible. I have, of course, treated it as a general question apart from all particular cases or personal questions. It is a principle of action that has to be seen in its right light and proportions.

5. 5The Gita’s Way of Yoga

   There is no need for you to change the line of life and work you have chosen so long as you feel that to be the way of your nature (svabhava) or dictated to you by your inner being or. for some reason, it is seen to be your proper dharma. These are the three tests and apart from that I do not know if there is any fixed line of conduct or way of work or life that can be laid down for the yoga of the Gita. It is the spirit or consciousness in which the work is done that matters most; the outer form can vary greatly for different natures. This, so long as one does not get the settled experience of the Divine Power taking up one’s works and doing them; afterwards it is the Power which determines what is to be done or not done. The overcoming of all attachments must necessarily be difficult and cannot come except as the fruit of a long sadhana—unless there is a rapid general growth in the inner spiritual experience which is the substance of the Gita’s teaching. The cessation of desire of the fruit. of the attachment to the work itself, the growth of equality to all beings, to all happenings, to good repute or ill-repute, praise or blame. to good fortune or ill fortune, the dropping of the ego which are necessary for the loss of all attachments can come completely only when all work becomes a spontaneous sacrifice to the Divine, the heart is offered up to Him and one has the settled experience of the Divine in all things and all beings. This consciousness or experience must come in all parts and movements of the being, sarvabhavena, not only in the mind and idea; then the falling away of all attachments becomes easy. I speak of the Gita’s way of yoga, for in the ascetic life one obtains the same object differently, by cutting away from the objects of attachment and the consequent atrophy of the attachment itself through rejection and disuse.

6. 6Karmayoga: Works done in union with the Divine

   I do not mean by work action done in the ego and the ignorance, for the satisfaction of the ego and in the drive of rajasic desire. There can be no Karmayoga without the will to get rid of ego, rajas and desire; which are the seals of ignorance. I do not mean philanthropy or the service of humanity or all the rest of the things—moral or idealistic—which the mind of man substitutes for the deeper truth of works. I mean by work action done for the Divine and more and more in union with the Divine—for the Divine alone and nothing else. Naturally that is not easy at the beginning, any more than deep meditation and luminous knowledge are easy or even true love and bhakti are easy. But like the others it has to be begun in the right spirit and attitude. with the right will in you; then all the rest will come. Works done in this spirit are quite as effective as bhakti or contemplation. One gets by the rejection of desire. rajas and ego a quietude and purity into which the Peace ineffable can descend; one gets by the dedication of one’s will to the Divine. by the merging of one’s will in the Divine Will the death of ego and the enlarging into the cosmic consciousness or else the uplifting into what is above the cosmic; one experiences the separation of Purusha from Prakriti and is liberated from the shackles of the outer nature; one becomes aware of one’s inner being and sees the outer as an instrument; one feels the universal Force doing one’s works and the Self or Purusha watching or witness but free; one feels all one’s works taken from one and done by the universal or supreme Mother or by the Divine Power controlling and acting from behind the heart. By constant referring of all one’s will and works to the Divine, love and adoration grow, the psychic being comes forward. Bv the reference to the Power above, we can come to feel it above and its descent and the opening to an increasing consciousness and knowledge. Finally. works. bhakti and knowledge go together and self-perfection becomes possible—what we call the transformation of the nature. These results certainly do not come all at once; they come more or less slowly, more or less completely according to the condition and growth of the being. There is no royal road to the divine realisation. This is the Karmayoga laid down in the Gita as I have developed it for the integral spiritual life. It is founded not on speculation and reasoning but on experience. It does not exclude meditation and certainly does not exclude bhakti. for the self-offering to the Divine, the consecration of all one self to the Divine which is the essence of this Karmayoga are essentially a movement of bhakti. only it does exclude a life-fleeing exclusive meditation or an emotional bhakti shut up in its own inner dream taken as the whole movement of the yoga. One may have hours of pure absorbed meditation or of the inner motionless adoration and ecstasy, but they are not the whole of the integral yoga.

7. 7Line of Karmayoga laid down by the Gita

   The greatest gospel of spiritual works eyer yet given to the race, the most perfect system of Karmayoga known to man in the past, is to be found in the Bhagavad Gita. In that famous episode of the Mahabharata the great basic lines of Karmayoga are laid down for all time with an incomparable mastery and the infallible eye of an assured experience. It is true that the path alone, as the ancients saw it, is worked out fully: the perfect fulfillment, the highest secret (rahasyam uttamam) is hinted rather than developed; it is kept back as an unexpressed part of a supreme mystery. There are obvious reasons for this reticence; for the fulfillment is in any case a matter for experience and no teaching can express it. It cannot be described in a way that can really be understood by a mind that has not the effulgent transmuting experience. And for the soul that has passed the shining portals and stands in the blaze of the inner light, all mental and verbal description is as poor as it is superfluous, inadequate and an impertinence. All divine consummations have perforce to be figured by us in the inapt and deceptive terms of a language which was made to fit the normal experience of mental man; so expressed. they can be rightly understood only by those who already know, and, knowing, are able to a give these poor external terms a changed, inner and 3 transfigured sense. As the Vedic Rishis insisted in the 7 beginning, the words of the supreme wisdom are expressive only to those who are already of the wise. The Gita at its cryptic close may seem by its silence to stop short of that solution for which we are seeking; it pauses at the borders of the highest spiritual mind and does not cross them into the splendours of the supramental Light. And yet its secret of dynamic. and not only static, identity with the inner Presence, its highest mystery of absolute surrender to the Divine Guide, Lord and lnhabitant of our nature. is the central secret. This surrender is the indispensable means of the supramental change and, again. it is through the supramental change that the dynamic identity becomes possible. What then are the lines of Karmayoga laid down by the Gita? Its key principle, its spiritual method, can be summed up as the union of two largest and highest states or powers of consciousness, equality and oneness. The kernel of its method is an unreserved acceptance of the Divine in our life as in our inner self and spirit. An inner renunciation of personal desire leads to equality, accomplishes our total surrender to the Divine. supports a delivery from dividing ego which brings us oneness. But this must be a oneness in dynamic force and not only in static peace or inactive beatitude. The Gita promises us freedom for the spirit even in the midst of works and the full energies of Nature, if we accept subjection of our whole being to that which is higher than the separating and limiting ego. It proposes an integral dynamic activity founded on a still passivity; a largest possible action irrevocably based on an immobile calm is its secret-free expression out of a supreme inward silence.

8. 8A Complete Surrender: The Crowning Movement of Gita’s Yoga

   There is no real contradiction; the two passages (‘Deliver the self by means of the Self’ (Gita, Ch. VI, 5); and “Abandon all dharmas” (Ibid., Ch. XVIII, 66)) indicate in the Gita’s system two different movements of its yoga, the complete surrender being the crowning movement. One has first to conquer the lower nature, deliver the self involved in the lower movement by means of the higher Self which rises into the divine nature; at the same time one offers all one’s actions including the inner action of the yoga as a sacrifice to the Purushottama, the transcendent and immanent Divine. When one has risen into the higher Self, has the knowledge and is free, one makes the complete surrender to the Divine, abandoning all other dharmas, living only by the divine Consciousness, the divine Will and Force, the divine Ananda.

9. 9The Law of Sacrifice

   The law of sacrifice is the common divine action that was thrown out into the world in its beginning as a symbol of the solidarity of the universe. It is by the attraction of this law that a divinising principle, a saving power descends to limit and correct and gradually to eliminate the errors of an egoistic and self-divided creation. This descent, this sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate them, is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance. “For with sacrifice as their companion,” says the Gita, “the All-Father created these peoples.”The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world. It is its admission that, even in this much fragmented existence, there is beyond itself and behind that which is not its own egoistic person, something greater and completer, a diviner All which demands from it subordination and service.”

10. 10Ascension to the Supramental Consciousness

    The language of the Gita in many matters seems sometimes contradictory because it admits two apparently opposite truths and tries to reconcile them. It admits the ideal of departure from samsara into the Brahman as one possibility; also it affirms the possibility of living free in the Divine (in Me, it says) and acting in the world as the Jivanmukta. It is this latter kind of solution on which it lays the greatest emphasis. So Ramakrishna put the “divine souls” ashwarakoti) who can descend the ladder as well as ascend it higher than the Jivas (Jivakoti) who, once having ascended, have not the strength to descend again for divine work. The full truth is in the supramental consciousness and the power to work from there on life and Matter.

11. 11Living in the Consciousness of the Supreme Being

    I do not know that there is anything like a Purushottama consciousness which the human being can attain or realise for himself; for, in the Gita, the Purushottama is the Supreme Lord, the Supreme Being who is beyond the Immutable and the Mutable and contains both the One and the Many. Man, says the Gita, can attain the Brahmic consciousness, realise himself as an eternal portion of the Purushottama and live in the Purushottama. The Purushottama consciousness is the consciousness of the Supreme Being and man by loss of ego and realisation of his true essence can live in it.

12. 12Vyasa: The Author of the Gita

    If it is questioned whether the Bhagavadgita is the work of Vyasa (whether he be Krishna of the Island is another question to be settled on its own merits), I answer that there is nothing to disprove his authorship. while on the one hand. allowing for the exigencies of philosophical exposition, the style is undoubtedly his or so closely modeled on his as to defy differentiation. More over, the whole piece is but the philosophical justification and logical enlargement of the gospel of action preached by Krishna in the Mahabharata proper, the undoubted work of the poet.

13. 13Gita: A Poetry of Overmind Inspiration

    The word has power even the ordinary written word has a power. If it is an inspired word it has still more power. What kind of power or power for what depends on the nature of the inspiration and the theme and the part of the being it touches. If it is the Word itself, as in certain utterances of the great Scriptures, Vedas, Upanishads, Gita, it may well have a power to awaken a spiritual and uplifting impulse, even certain kinds of realization. To say that it cannot contradicts spiritual experience. The Vedic poets regarded their poetry as Mantras, they were the vehicles of their own realizations and could become vehicles of realization for others. Naturally, these mostly would be illuminations, not the settled and permanent realization that is the goal of Yoga but they could be steps on the way or at least lights on the way. I have had in former times many illuminations. even initial realisations while meditating on verses of the Upanishads or the Gita. Anything that carries the Word, the Light in it, spoken or written, can light this fire within, open a sky. as it were. bring the effective vision of which the Word is the body. The Gita owes its poetical success to its starting from a great and critical situation in life, having that in view and always returning upon it, and to its method which is to seize on a spiritual experience or moment or stage of the inner life and throw it into the form of thought; and this. though a delicate operation, can keep well within the limits of the poetic manner of speech. only where it overburdens itself with metaphysical matter and deviates into sheer philosophic definition and discrimination. which happens essentially in two or three of its closing chapters, does the poetic voice sink under the weight, even occasionally into flattest versified prose. The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light and comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of lntuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate. a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater. The passages you mention from the Upanishad and the Gita have certainly the Overmind accent.

14. 14Using the Verses of the Gita for Japa

    Verses of the Gita can be used as japa, if the object is to realise the Truth that the verses contain in them... Everything depends on the selection of the verses. A coherent summary of the Gita’s teaching cannot easily be put together by putting together some verses, but that is not necessary for a purpose of this kind which could only be to put the key truths together—not for intellectual exposition but for grasping in realization which is the object of japa.

15. 15The Gita and Terrorism

    There is no evidence to show that its (Gita’s) tenets were used to justify a gospel of Terrorism. The only doctrine of the Gita the Terrorist can pervert to his use. is the dictum that the Kshatriya must slay as a part of his duty and he can do it without sin if he puts egoism away and acts selflessly. without attachment. in and for God. as a sacrifice. as an offering of action to the Lord of action. If this teaching is in itself false. there is no moral basis for the hero. the soldier. the judge. the king. the legislature which recognizes capital punishment. They must all be condemned as criminals and offenders against humanity. It is certainly true that since the revival of religious thought in India the Gita has ceased to be what Mr. Risley calls it. a transcendental philosophy. and has been made a rule of life. It is undoubtedly true that selflessness. courage. a free and noble activity have been preached as the kernel of the ethics of the Gita. That teaching has in no country been condemned as ignoble. criminal or subversive of morality. nor is a philosophy of any value to any sensible being if it is only transcendental and cannot be lived. We strongly protest against the brand of suspicion that has been sought to be placed in many quarters on the teaching and possession of the Gita.- our chief national heritage. our hope for the future. our great force for the purification of the moral weaknesses that stain and hamper our people.

16. 16The Caller and the Called

    Why do some hear it (the call of the flute) and see him. others not? We are thrown back on two alternatives: Krishna’s Grace calls whom it wills to call without any determining reason for the choice of the rejection. it is all his mercy or his withholding or at least delaying of his mercy, or else he calls the hearts that are ready to vibrate and leap up at his call - and even there he waits till the moment has come. To say that it does not depend on outward merit or appearance of fitness is no doubt true: the something that was ready to wake in spite, it may be, of many hard layers in which it was enclosed, may be something visible to Krishna and not to us. It was there perhaps long before the flute began to play. but Krishna was busy melting the hard layers so that the heart in its leap might not be pressed back by them when the awakening notes came. The Gopis heard and rushed out into the forest. the others did not—or did they think it was only some rustic music or some rude cowherd-lover fluting to his sweetheart: not a call that learned and cultured or virtuous ears could recognize as the call of the Divine? There is something to be said after all for the adhikari-bheda. But, of course, it must be understood in the large sense: some may have the adhikara for recognizing Krishna’s flute, some for the call of Christ, some for the dance of Shiva—to each his own way and his nature’s answer to the Divine Call. Adhikara cannot be stated in rigid mental terms: it is something spiritual and subtle, something mystic and secret between the called and the Caller.

॥