Gita Satsangh, Chapter 9 Verses 4 to 6 - From Aurobindo: 1 of 4

[Guest guest]

Namaste.

 

I intend to make four continuous posts, by attempting to

summarise Aurobindo’s explanations of verses 4 to 6. I think

this will help us understand Aurobindo as well as Advaita

better. Any writing of Aurobindo has to be studied more than

once before we can get some feeling of oneness with the thought

expressed by him. Therefore, let us read carefully. We are in

the core portion of the gita, so it will be worth the effort.

 

Important note: All the words below are from Aurobindo. I have

only dropped certain portions and made some punctuational

changes in the remaining. But wherever a word or phrase or a

sentence is interspersed in ALL CAPITALS it is my own

‘intended-to-be-explanatory’ comment on what is going on!

VK

-------------------------------The

supreme secret is the mystery of the transcendent Godhead who is

all and everywhere. Our one ultimate way is the turning of our

entire existence in the world into a single movement towards the

eternal. (NOTE THE WORDS ‘ENTIRE’ AND ‘SINGLE’. IN FACT THIS IS

AUROBINDO’S BOTTOMLINE THESIS. SPIRITUAL PRACTICE IS NOT AN

ISOLATED EXERCISE BUT IT MUST BE THE WAY OF ONE’S LIVING). By

the power and mystery of a divine Yoga we have come out into

this phenomenal world. By a reverse movement of the same Yoga we

must transcend the limits of phenomenal nature and recover the

greater Consciousness.

 

The supreme being of the divine is beyond manifestation. What we

see is only a self-created form, ‘rUpa’, not the eternal form of

Divinity, ‘sva-rUpa’. All this weft of things, all this mass of

becomings, cannot contain him either in their sum or in their

separate existence. He is not in them; it is not in them or by

them that he lives, moves or has his being. God is not the

Becoming. It is they that are in him. They are his becoming. He

is their being.

 

And even to say of him that all exists in him is not the whole

truth of the matter, not the entirely real relation; for it is

to speak of him with the idea of space, and the Divine is

spaceless and timeless. Space and time, immanence and pervasion

and exceeding are all of them terms and images of his

consciousness. There is a yoga of divine power, ‘me yoga

aishvaraH’, by which the supreme creates phenomena of himself in

a spiritual, not a material, self-formulation of his own

extended infinity. It is an extension of which the material is

only an image. He sees himself as one with that, is identified

with that, and all its harbors. In that infinite self-seeing,

which is not his whole seeing, -- the pantheist identity of God

and universe is a still more limited view , -- he is at once

one with all that is and yet exceeds it. But he is other also

than this self or extended infinity of spiritual being which

contains and exceeds the universe. All exists here in his

world-conscious infinite, but that again is upheld as a

self-conception by the supra-cosmic reality of Godhead which

exceeds all our terms of world and being and consciousness.

 

This is the mystery of his being that he is supracosmic, yet not

in any exhaustive sense extracosmic. For he pervades it all as

its self; there is a luminous uninvolved presence of the

self-being of God, ‘mama AtmA’, which is in constant relation

with the becoming and brings all its existences into

manifestation by his simple presence. Therefore it is that we

have these terms of Being and becoming, existence in itself,

Atman, and existences dependent upon it, bhUtAni, mutable beings

and immutable being. But the highest truth of these relations

and the resolution of their antinomy must be found in that which

exceeds it. It is the supreme Godhead who manifests both

containing self and its contained phenomena by the power of his

spiritual consciousness, yogamAyA. And it is only through union

with him in our spiritual consciousness that we can arrive at

our real relations with his being.

Metaphysically stated, this is the intention of these verses of

the Gita. But they rest founded not upon any intellectual

speculation, but on spiritual experience. They synthetise

because they arise globally from certain truths of spiritual

consciousness.

 

(AT THIS POINT AUROBINDO STARTS REVEALING HIS OWN PERSONALITY

BY WRITING INSPIRINGLY FROM WHAT-MUST-HAVE-BEEN HIS OWN

PERSONAL YOGA-EXPERIENCE.)

(TO BE CONTINUED IN No.2 OF 4)

 

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.

 

 

 

Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos & More

http://faith.