God, The Saviour
The Sense of The Bhagavad Gītā
There is a saving Grace immanent in the earth-consciousness, a succour and hope for humanity since the beginning of Time. It is the presence of an immortal and transcendent Purusha in the great cycle of evolution and a direct substance of Him in the grim and dark materiality of things in Matter, for He is the Master and Saviour of the universe and beyond, the ineffable Godhead of both soul and spirit, both Author and divine Songbird of the Gita, the immeasurable Deity of whom we are a living fragment and to whom we are all moving towards, the absolute Centre of all other centres, the One and the Many in form and substance and beyond all form and substance, the Word and Thought and Inspiration of the Kavi, the Chisel and the Sculptor and the Stone; in a word, He alone is, the Krishna of whom humanity is a happy expression, or at least it was so meant to be when it had come into existence out of the primal seed of Life and Spirit. To discover this divine Presence within us, to be able to organise all that we are and in all our parts around the immanent Divine is the beginning of a conscious Yoga in the Spirit. There is also a standing presence, determinant of nothing, behind the unnumbered complexities of our mental make-up and buried under the depths of our superficial personality, a power of the Divine Truth, a conscious personality which looks upon the world as a bleak point in a multitude of images. This secret presence in man is his true self, it is his password to enter the Divine Nature and all else is nothing but a support and a movement towards that Supreme Destiny. It is the discovery of the Psychic which is the first necessary and indispensable step towards finding the all-immanent and all-beautiful Deity within us, for indeed the Psychic is a spark of the Divine Truth in evolution, and by its innate turn and spontaneous nature always and unfailingly finds the Divine immanent in everything, as it also realises the Divine to be its origin and support in evolution as elsewhere. It is an extension of the Divine Truth in Time as it encases within itself the seed of a supreme self-transcendence beyond Time and Space. It is a symbol of a greater Divinity around which all the lowers members must gather and organise themselves before they can be spiritualised by a still greater Light and Consciousness.
The Psychic being is the true individual, both in the actual sense and in the sense of its evolutionary dynamics, and because it occupies an important and indispensable role in the perfection of the individual, therefore its evolution in the aspirant marks a stage of an individual self-ascent into the higher divine Consciousness, and it evolves out of its own divine spark into a pure fire rising up towards the higher heavens of the Spirit. The Psychic fire is an incarnation of Agni in the individual, constituted and expressed by a greater Love above, but the Psychic being is a divine Purusha himself, a godhead in his own right and by his divine inheritance, and it is only when man has united with his Psychic being that a farther development and consequent attainment of his spiritual being becomes possible. The difference between Psychic and Spirit is that the latter is the cause and reason of evolution, while the former is, though a portion of the Divine, part of evolutionary nature and evolves from a little fireling into a being of its own indisputable and unique stature, a divine centre of a secret Consciousness immanent here in the heart of the individual and terrestrial nature. The Psychic is a direct principle of the Divine Consciousness in evolution, and though withheld and imperceptible to the outer senses at first, it aids the evolution and consequent perfection of the lower members when it has already emerged strongly into the outer personality, engulfing it in the pure and unalloyed bliss of a direct identity with the immanent Divine. In a word, the Psychic being is a symbol of a saving Grace in evolution, and it is around which everything must be initially organised before one can safely leap into a greater divine Nature above.
Nothing in the world or in the universe or anywhere else can exist on its own without an impelling Force of the Divine, no form or formless determinisms can be possible without a divine Creatrix, no ascending and descending ladder of Consciousness without an infinitely self-effectuating Power. The world was not created out of a cosmic chaos, or ordered chaos if we must, as science might stipulate, but from the spiritual viewpoint, a from a higher experience, it had come into being from an immanent Power in the universe; it rose out of a cosmic body of Vishnu, the Preserver of countless existences in the great supracosmic body of the highest Spirit. It is तत्व in manifestation, an infinite Truth in its own limitless potentialities and self-exceeding dynamism, pounding upon the very foundation of the earth in order to break the hard resistance and so form out of its own inherent knowledge and power an infinitely supple and strong foundation for a higher manifestation of the Spirit here, and in a farther development, consequent of the descent of the supreme Spirit into the terrestrial, the inevitable transformation of the earth-consciousness into a self-evolving Superstructure of the Divine Gnosis.
It may be contested by modern science, and more likely to be detested, on the basis of cognisable phenomena of existence that a spiritual viewpoint of evolution can only be a philosophical or theological abstraction, and all sense of incognisable phenomena or of the inapparent has to be faithfully eschewed from the realms of rational enquiry and reasoned approach. It was so with one of such inglorious intentions, not directly by scientific community, but by self-proclaimed rationalists that a historical event such as the construction of Rāmasetu or Adam’s Bridge over an ocean between two land masses was debunked as nothing more than a mythological exaggeration of a man-made story about a legendary Hindu King, who never existed except in the poetic imagination of वाल्मीकि, Valmiki. Such puerile theories of the West, based more on self-denial of truth and an exaggerated notion of their cultural as well as religious superiority over other faiths, do not stand against the emerging synthesis of a greater knowledge of the immanent Spirit here, the spark and splendour of which we ourselves bear in the depths of our inmost being, and it is out of this spiritual self-dynamism that a sense of all our civilisational, cultural and spiritual preservation must come into the governing life-principle of Nature, aided by a great apparatus of a descending synthesis of the divine Gnosis into the terrestrial and its difficult conditions. And, to preserve a great spiritual symbol of a prehistoric culture such as the Rāmasetu, which is more than a symbol, and certainly more than a mere affirmation in floating stones, is the sacred duty of the spiritual descendants of Rama which we are in our natural being. Besides, a prehistoric feat of outstanding engineering cannot be understood or studied by the measures of the fragile feats of modern engineering or by the minds steeped into the vigour and vitality of the external being and its limited and egoistic achievements. Pray tell, how can we convince these intellectual brutes about an अवतार (a divine Godhead in self-manifestation) who was here and who had build a bridge over the ocean instead of the one who had walked on water, of which there is mention in history but none at all for the eyes and the senses? To preserve the civilisational values of a prehistoric culture is also the bounden duty of the Kshatriya, the intemperate child of the Divine Mother and a conscious slave of the Divine.
We may have to pause for a while from our social and civilisational perspectives and engage ourselves with the spiritual root of these high tendencies and impulses in order to understand the relationship between Spirit and Matter, between Purusha and Prakriti, while seeking out of these still higher values of a gnostic Consciousness both above and in the terrestrial. God and man are inseparable twins in the terrestrial as elsewhere, until even this subtle difference is transcended in the ineffable oneness of the transcendent Spirit. It is out of this natural accord arises the impulse to perfection in all and everything, but we have to transcend the difference everywhere, especially in the most physical Matter and conquer the disparate elements of entangled Life and Matter caught in the mire of lower existence. A spiritual perspective,whether of social or civilisational, derives from both inner and higher realisation of God as our basis and reason for existence, and it is from this integrally self-aware state of consciousness comes the integral power to preserve the higher values of a greater, prehistoric civilisation and its numerous social and civilisational values, and to build a strong and sacred pedestal for the Golden Krishna and His ineffable Ananda. Sri Krishna is best expressed and best realised in evolution than in the infinite fields of divine ether, his message better understood and better amplified in the sacred systems of our collective society here in the terrestrial than in the luminous mind-planes, and we must create such conditions which are both necessary and indispensable, but we must not rely on the present human systems and their outward mechanisms to preserve the inherent spiritual values and symbols and their equally indispensable outward manifestations. The role of Nature in this high spiritual endeavour is indispensable, and without her aid, no change is possible on the ground, neither the infinite divine Force of Sri Krishna can work freely here without her creating the necessary conditions for its free and unimpaired manifestation. The earth needs to be saved, its self-abounding and self-evolving species protected and nurtured by the saving Grace of Sri Krishna, and all that is symbolic of a progressive future in the Divine, even if it is a mere, dilapidated stone-structure or a worn-out carving, must be preserved and protected by the creed of the Aryan fighters.
A threesome aspect or divine determination of the Spirit, Psychic and Nature into the conflicting conditions and negations of the earth-consciousness must involve an anterior knowledge of a higher divine Gnosis already established in the earth conditions, and this must involve too the conscious participation of the individual and his effort to rise higher into a Supernature, to which humanity as a whole is rising rather unconsciously or half-consciously, through many deviations and diversions and long cycles. To effectuate this difficult change, we must first preserve the great spiritual traditions, values and symbols of a prehistoric Knowledge, not in the present forms of useless preoccupation with a dry, outward and lifeless symbols and externalities of religion — which is nothing more than a starting point — but in the eternal forms of the immanent Spirit, known to us as the Lord of the Gita.
End of part 10
The Sense of the Bhagavad Gita — Introduction
The Sense of the Bhagavad Gita — Sense of Nationalism
The Sense of the Bhagavad Gita — The Forms of Governance
The Sense of the Bhagavad Gita — Vidya or Education
The Sense of the Bhagavad Gita — The Sign and Symbol of a Teacher
The Sense of the Bhagavad Gita — The Nature and Dynamics of Spiritual Action
The Sense of the Bhagavad Gita — The Guide within
The Sense of the Bhagavad Gita — The Conduct of a Disciple