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Essays on the Gita -Sri Aurobindo
Second Series : PART-2 : Chapter 21
Towards the Supreme Secret
When the soul has lost its separative personality, when it has become the Brahman, it is then that it can live in the true Person and can attain to the supreme revealing bhakti for the Purushottama and can come to know him utterly by the power of its profound bhakti, its heart’s knowledge, bhaktya mam abhija nati. That is the integral knowledge, when the heart’s fathomless vision com- pletes the mind’ sab solute experience,—samagram mam jnatva . “He comes to know Me,” says the Gita, “who and how much I am and in all the reality and principles of my being, yavan yas casmi tattvatah.” This integral knowledge is the knowledge of the Divine present in the individual; it is the entire experience of the Lord secret in the heart of man, revealed now as the supreme Self of his existence, the Sun of all his illumined consciousness, the Master and Power of all his works, the divine Fountain of all his soul’s love and delight, the Lover and Beloved of his worship and adoration. It is the knowledge too of the Divine extended in the universe, of the Eternal from whom all proceeds and in whom all lives and has its being, of the Self and Spirit of the cosmos, of Vasudeva who has become all this that is, of the Lord of cosmic existence who reigns over the works of Nature. It is the knowledge of the divine Purusha luminous in his transcendent eternity, the form of whose being escapes from the thought of the mind but not from its silence; it is the entire living experience of him as absolute Self, supreme Brahman, supreme Soul, supreme Godhead: for that seemingly incommunicable Absolute is at the same time and even in that highest status the originating Spirit of the cosmic action and Lord of all these existences. The soul of the liberated man thus enters by a reconciling knowledge, penetrates by a perfect simultaneous delight of the transcendent Divine, of the Divine in the individual and of the Divine in the universe into the Purushottama,mam vis atetadanantaram.He becomes one with him in his self-knowledge and self-experience, one with him in his being and consciousness and will and world- knowledge and world-impulse, one with him in the universe and in his unity with all creatures in the universe and one with him beyond world and individual in the transcendence of the eternal Infinite, sasvatam ̇ padam avyayam. This is the culmination of the supreme bhakti that is at the core of the supreme knowledge. |
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