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INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
8. Yoga-sastra
But those who realize their dignity as men are acutely aware of the discord and seek a principle of harmony and peace.
Arjuna typifies the representative human soul seeking to reach perfection and peace but in the opening section we find that his mind is clouded, his convictions unsettled, his whole consciousness confused. Life's anxieties touch him with a gnawing distress. For every individual there comes an hour sometime or other, for nature is not in a hurry, when everything that he can do for himself fails, when he sinks into the gulf of utter blackness, an hour when he would give all that he has for one gleam of light, for one sign of the Divine. When he is assailed by doubt, denial, hatred of life and black despair, he can escape from them only if God lays His hand on him. If the divine truth which is free of access to all mankind, is attained only by a few, it shows that only a few are willing to pay the price for it. The sense of insufficiency, of barrenness and dust, is due to the working of the Perfection, the mystery that lurks at the heart of creation. The invisible impulse to seek God produces the agony that inspires heroic idealism and human fulfilment. The image of God in us expresses itself in the infinite capacity for self-transcendence.[1]
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