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Essays on the Gita -Sri Aurobindo
First Series : Chapter 7
The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
This high and great knowledge, this strenuous selfdiscipline
of the mind and soul by which it is to rise beyond
the clamour of the emotions and the cheat of the senses to true
self-knowledge, may well free us from grief and delusion; it may
well cure us of the fear of death and the sorrow for the dead;
it may well show us that those whom we speak of as dead are
not dead at all nor to be sorrowed for, since they have only gone
beyond; it may well teach us to look undisturbed upon the most
terrible assaults of life and upon the death of the body as a trifle;
it may exalt us to the conception of all life’s circumstances as a
manifestation of the One and as a means for our souls to raise
themselves above appearances by an upward evolution until we
know ourselves as the immortal Spirit. But how does it justify the
action demanded of Arjuna and the slaughter of Kurukshetra?
The answer is that this is the action required of Arjuna in the
path he has to travel; it has come inevitably in the performance
of the function demanded of him by his svadharma, his social
duty, the law of his life and the law of his being. This world,
this manifestation of the Self in the material universe is not only
a cycle of inner development, but a field in which the external
circumstances of life have to be accepted as an environment and
an occasion for that development. It is a world of mutual help
and struggle; not a serene and peaceful gliding through easy joys
is the progress it allows us, but every step has to be gained by
heroic effort and through a clash of opposing forces.
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