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Essays on the Gita -Sri Aurobindo
Second Series : Chapter 7
The Supreme Word of the Gita
The Gita itself does not evolve any quite novel solution out of its own questionings. To arrive at the comprehensiveness at which it aims, it goes back behind the great philosophical systems to the original Vedanta of the Upanishads; for there we have the widest and profoundest extant synthetic vision of spirit and man and cosmos. But what is in the Upanishads undeveloped to the intelligence because wrapped up in a luminous kernel of intuitive vision and symbolic utterance, the Gita brings out in the light of a later intellectual thinking and distinctive experience. In the frame of its synthesis it admits the seeking of the abstractive thinkers for the Indefinable, anirdes yam, the ever unmanifest Immutable, avyaktam aksaram. Those who devote themselves to this search, find, they also, the Purushottama, the supreme Divine Person, ma ̄m, the Spirit and highest Soul and Lord of things. For his utmost self-existent way of being is indeed an unthinkable, acintyaru ̄ pam, an unimaginable positive, an absolute quintessence of all absolutes far beyond the determination of the intelligence. The method of negative passivity, quietude, renunciation of life and works by which men feel after this intangible Absolute is admitted and ratified in the Gita’s philosophy, but only with a minor permissive sanction. This negating knowledge approaches the Eternal by one side only of the truth and that side the most difficult to reach and follow for the embodied soul in Nature, duhkham dehavadbhir ava pyate; it proceeds by a highly specialised, even an unnecessarily arduous way, “narrow and difficult to tread as a razor’s edge.” Not by denying all relations, but through all relations is the Divine Infinite naturally approachable to man and most easily, widely, intimately seizable. This seeing is not after all the largest or the truest truth that the Supreme is without any relations with the mental, vital, physical existence of man in the universe, avyavaha ryam, nor that what is described as the empirical truth of things, the truth of relations, vyavaha ̄ra, is altogether the opposite of the highest spiritual truth, parama rtha. On the contrary there are a thousand relations by which the supreme Eternal is secretly in contact and union with our human existence and by all essential ways of our nature and of the world’s nature, sarvabha vena, can that contact be made sensible and that union made real to our soul, heart, will, intelligence, spirit. |
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