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Essays on the Gita -Sri Aurobindo
First Series : Chapter 14
The Principle of Divine Works
His motive of action can only be the holding together of the peoples,
cikırsur lokasan graham. This great march of the peoples
towards a far-off divine ideal has to be held together, prevented
from falling into the bewilderment, confusion and utter discord
of the understanding which would lead to dissolution and destruction
and to which the world moving forward in the night
or dark twilight of ignorance would be too easily prone if it
were not held together, conducted, kept to the great lines of its
discipline by the illumination, by the strength, by the rule and
example, by the visible standard and the invisible influence of
its Best. The best, the individuals who are in advance of the
general line and above the general level of the collectivity, are
the natural leaders of mankind, for it is they who can point to
the race both the way they must follow and the standard or
ideal they have to keep to or to attain. But the divinised man is
the Best in no ordinary sense of the word and his influence, his
example must have a power which that of no ordinarily superior
man can exercise. What example then shall he give? What rule or standard shall he uphold?
In order to indicate more perfectly his meaning, the divine
Teacher, the Avatar gives his own example, his own standard to
Arjuna. “I abide in the path of action,” he seems to say, “the path
that all men follow; thou too must abide in action. In the way I
act, in that way thou too must act. I am above the necessity of
works, for I have nothing to gain by them; I am the Divine who
possess all things and all beings in the world and I am myself
beyond the world as well as in it and I do not depend upon
anything or anyone in all the three worlds for any object; yet I
act. This too must be thy manner and spirit of working. I, the
Divine, am the rule and the standard; it is I who make the path
in which men tread; I am the way and the goal. But I do all this
largely, universally, visibly in part, but far more invisibly; and
men do not really know the way of my workings. Thou, when
thou knowest and seest, when thou hast become the divinised
man, must be the individual power of God, the human yet divine
example, even as I am in my avatars.
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