Gita Satsangh; Chapter 9 Verses 1 to 3 -- Aurobindo

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Namaste

 

Once upon a time (fifty years ago) when I first tried to study

Aurobindo, I thought I would never unravel what he is saying.

Not that the situation has changed now. But it is slightly

better. That is all. I have tried below to present a (brief)

summary (in his own words) of his 10-page coverage of slokas 1

to 3 of the ninth chapter, which forms, in fact, an introduction

to the rest of the gita.

----------------------------

 

1. The Teacher draws attention to the decisive character of what

he is about to say and lead up to the vision of the eleventh

chapter. This vision is to make him (Arjuna) strong for the

action from which he has shrunk. To recoil from this action

would be the denial and negation of the divine will. His

intellectual doubts are clearing away. But intellectual clarity

is not enough. He has to act with the consent of his whole

being, with shraddhA. So far only the scaffolding has been

raised. The full frame of the structure is now to be placed

before his unsealed vision. He need not any more be tied to the

works of ignorance. He may start now as a higher thinker, the

knower, the Yogin, the seeker of freedom first and afterwards

the liberated spirit.

2. There is a calm eternal spirit within us superior to

everything. It sees the ego, its will and its intelligence are

all a machinery of Nature. It is itself free from these things.

It knows that Nature and ego and the personal being of all these

creatures do not make up the whole existence. For existence is

not merely a glorious panorama of a constant mutation of

becoming. Not affected by the mutations of Nature there is a

timeless self-existence. It is the friend of none, the enemy of

none, but one equal self of all. Man is not now conscious of

this self. Ego is the obstacle. To become spirit, no longer

merely a mind and ego, is the opening word of this message of

liberation.

3. Arjuna must stand back first from his egoistic demand on the

world. He must now work only as one among the millions

contributing his share of effort and labour to a result

determined not by himself but by the universal action and

purpose. Not only that. He has to do more, he has to give up the

idea of being a doer and to see that it is the universal will,

intelligence, mind and life that is at work in him and in all

others.

4. This liberation is actually a spiritual detachment. It is

not the scientific and intelligent detachment of materialistic

philosophers who have some clear vision of Nature but not the

perception of one’s own soul and self-being. Nor is it the

intellectual detachment of the idealist sage who escapes from

the more limiting and disturbing forms of his ego by a luminous

use of reason. This is a larger more perfect detachment that

comes by a vision of the Supreme who is more than Nature and

greater than mind and reason. This divine detachment must be the

foundation for a divine participation in Nature which will

replace the old egoistic participation. The divine quietism must

support a divine activism and kinetism. The larger ultimate

harmony of this integral Truth is being released in these

successive chapters.

5. Arjuna has to see that the same Godhead is the higher Truth

not only of self and spirit but of Nature and his own

personality, the secret at once of the individual and the

universe. Necessarily, to make this knowledge clear to the mind

of Arjuna, the divine teacher sets out by removing the source of

two remaining difficulties. These are, the antinomy between the

impersonal self and the human personality and the antinomy

between the self and Nature. Mechanical Nature is only a lower

Truth. There is a higher which is the spiritual and that is the

nature of our spiritual personality, our true person. God is at

once impersonal and personal. He is the Brahman. He manifests

himself in cosmos as the immutable timeless self omnipresent and

all-supporting. This Being is in its eternity being and not

becoming. Then, held in that being there is an essential power

or spiritual principle of self-becoming, svabhAva. Through this

self-becoming by spiritual self-vision it determines and

expresses, creates by liberation all that is latent in its own

existence. This truth is the secret of being which the Gita is

now going to apply in its amplitude of result for our inner life

and our outer works.

6. Faith is necessary. If faith is absent and if one trusts to

the critical intelligence that goes by outward facts and

jealously questions the revelatory knowledge that soul must

return to the path of ordinary mortal living. It then 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.

 

praNAms to all advaitins

profvk

 

 

 

=====

Prof. V. Krishnamurthy

My website on Science and Spirituality is http://www.geocities.com/profvk/

You can access my book on Gems from the Ocean of Hindu Thought Vision and

Practice, and my father R. Visvanatha Sastri's manuscripts from the site.

 

 

 

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