Karmayoga & Freedom

[Guest guest]

Namste to all.

 

A busy work schedule is keeping me from following all of the

postings as closely as I would like, but I think this may be

relevant to both the recent discussion on “free will” and the

opening Karma Yoga section of the Gita, so I offer the following

from Aurobindo’s The Synthesis of Yoga:

 

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The greatest gospel of spiritual works ever 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 fulfilment, the highest

secret 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 fulfilment is in any case a matter of

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 inept 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 give these poor external

terms a changed, inner and transfigured sense. As the Vedic Rishis

insisted in the 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 Inhabitant 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.

 

There are certain semblances of an equal spirit which must not be

mistaken for the profound and vast spiritual equality which the

Gita teaches. There is an equality of disappointed resignation, an

equality of pride, an equality of hardness and indifference: all

these are egoistic in their nature. Inevitably they come in the

course of the sadhana, but they must be rejected or transformed

into the true quietude. There is too, on a higher level, the

equality of the stoic, the equality of a devout resignation or a

sage detachment, the equality of a soul aloof from the world and

indifferent to its doings. These too are insufficient; first

approaches they can be, but they are at most early soul-phases only

or imperfect mental preparations for our entry into the true and

absolute self-existent wide equal oneness of the spirit.

 

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Aurobindo interprets the Gita as saying that the Jivanmukta, the

liberated sage, lives a freedom of the spirit and freely acts out

of a quiet oneness of spirit. It would seem reasonable to assume

that as one moves from gross ego-identification towards moksha,

there is a corresponding increase in existential freedom as one

acts more and more out of spirit rather than according to ego and

its karma.

 

Namaste.

-- Max

 

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