The Nature and Dynamics of Spiritual Action
The Sense of The Bhagavad Gītā
All material action, so impelled by the mind or goaded by the vital, is a compound figure of lower Prakriti, and as such, is not free from the taints of superficial knowledge of our half-lit ignorance. It evolves out of a mental discord, seeks to affirm itself by error and inconsistency of reason and forces itself upon the world, but it is always short of a self-fulfilling result and partial or even ineffective in its intended consequence. This is the nature of an action proceeding from the mind of a man in the twilight of his existence, a moment when everything seems to fail him, but he very often counters his fall by a recalcitrant ego of his worldly personality, the external buffoon or the outer living aberration, which also seeks to make action more complicated and less favourable in its essential result. But the element of ego or the sense of a self-denying personality can hardly be visible to the ignorant eye, and still more difficult to detect its presence in the nature of an all-conquering warrior, and if not for the wisdom of the divine Charioteer, Arjuna would have convinced him otherwise and the history of the great महाभारतम् would have led us into a spiritual derision and downfall of the great Indian civilisation. The refusal of Arjuna to fight for the establishment of Dharma -, the divine principle upon which all existence stands and by which it is supported, for even the Goddess who bears the weight of the world does so by the inherent strength of a great divine Equilibrium, of which Dharma is the heartbeat, and without which nothing can survive or progressively evolve here or elsewhere -, was a weakness of his superficial personality, founded upon a moral and ethical outlook of life.
The criterion upon which action stands or the reason for which action or non-action seems to be necessary depends on the consciousness of the individual in as much as it depends on a cosmic play of forces with the individual or even the race of men as a certain point of precipitation either for a wider divine change or a calamitous downfall and destruction. And, the necessity of war itself seems more forced than it is actually necessary, but the collective human race necessitates such a painful process towards perfection and collective growth; it is a slow curve of Nature in her quest towards a perfect world-order, and in her movement, she wastes much of the energy and resources, otherwise could be perfectly utilised if the mankind were more inclined towards a higher knowledge and a larger divine synthesis. It is in the idea of progress and forward spiritual movement lies the essential contradiction to perfect action, unless the idea or impulse comes directly from the Spirit above, and even if it does descend into the human collective consciousness, it is more likely to face a stubbornest resistance and a debilitating welcome. It is this natural paradox of dominant human ignorance which makes action a mere compound figure of a self-binding nature, and morality ensnares it in her golden cages and renders it impotent forever in the ignorance of being. So too, in the idea of action lies the supreme paradox of a greater resistance, which our moral and ethical outlooks can hardly understand. When action itself is an expression of a self-limiting nature steeped in ignorance, what shall one do to overcome the impediment to spiritual action, which seems to evade us all the time?
Arjuna was an epitome of this weakness and confusion, which has perplexed even the Rishis and Sages of old, for we can understand when this confusion creeps into a normal and unrefined human consciousness, still attached to the lower values of life, but when pervades the consciousness of an illimitable warrior, we may have to pause and refer to a greater authority of divine knowledge and derive our illumination from that higher Consciousness. The Gita is a synthesis of a greater spiritual action, a guidebook to a divine inlook and it has reverberated through the ages the song of the divine Paramour to his endeared disciple, and still, reverberates in the secret confines of our hearts and minds, but mankind has grown too ignorant to hear his voice or hearken to his impulse towards a greater perfection in the Spirit. The present civilisation has been built upon a conundrum of a collective discord and mutual revulsion, and it always seeks to engage conflict and disorganisation as a way of life, from which it cannot possibly escape to anything other than into its own shadows, only to be thrown back into a greater discord of being.
Sri Krishna saw the problem of action from the standpoint of his inherent knowledge, born of conscious Yoga and by being thrown into a precipice of inevitable action himself, but he stood there in strong nerve and spiritual glory, adorning and embracing the whole battlefield, as if it were one of his ornaments, but Arjuna saw slaughter and bloodshed, his kith and kin being dismembered and bleeding on the field; it was out of a sense of morality and self-attachment to virtues that he initially fielded himself into the battlefield, a bane of a mixed Kshatriya temper in which, instead of the divine Deity, a strong formative ego-principle takes centre stage and urges him to act under the dominant impulse of a rightful standard of human morality, and so exhorts him to avoid the impending doom and carnage by emotional intransigence, clouded by his sense of attachment to family and friends. Arjuna fell off the pedestal of Kshatriyahood into his human self, when he must have already massacred his enemies and smitten their hearts with his arrows.
The nature and dynamics of spiritual action, such as the one mooted by Sri Krishna in his divine song on the battlefield, is a power of a divine executive Knowledge above, and it can only be called into the lower compound nature by a conscious surrender to the Supreme Lord within us. The nature of man is a riddle and a strain of consciousness evolving through countless lives and difficulties in order to assume a favourable personality for a higher seeking and for a decisive turning towards a larger body of existence than its present, miserable condition, out of which nothing spiritually constructive seems to emerge or point to a decisive change. It always seeks to escape the problem of action, for action is indispensable to both spiritual ascent towards the Divine and self-expansion of the material consciousness towards the immanent Divine here in the terrestrial, by limiting its infinite possibilities into finite discords through adamant refusal and self-despair of a morally deranged consciousness. The ethical man in us represents the tendencies of a regressive mentality, which seeks the Divine only in as much as it suits its needs, and when it finds that the demand of a spiritual action is too difficult to comprehend or execute or does not point to a direction of its own selfish ends, it seeks to quiver in its vital sheath and refuse to do the Lord’s action. The ethical man is not a spiritual representative, neither is he a Kshatriya warrior; he only represents a certain stage in the individual evolution to be discarded at one stage for a higher spiritual nature, and to dwell too much in the lower light of an ethical and moral mentality is to make the evolving nature more rigid to a higher synthesis and larger puissance.
An action performed thus out of a greater divine impulse is the perfection that we are seeking here in the great discords and ambiguities of the lower mentality, and to establish there the first foundation of a robust spiritual nature which transcends the limitations of a self-centred ego is the spiritual culture that we are seeking to instil in the nature of a progressive humanity. Individual as well as collective action always tends to be vacillating and confusing in nature and is largely founded on a moral footing or yardstick, and to extricate out of that lower amalgam into a free movement of the Spirit may seem exceedingly difficult or near impossible to achieve, but it is largely due to the reason that the lower impulse to action is centred around the individual ego, and as such, cannot respond to the swiftness of the dynamic Spirit. Arjuna wanted the desired result himself and was willing to fight for it but with a rider too cumbersome and illogical to accommodate or be granted, for he thought of a world without massacre and loss of lives or even the need of a war, but he failed to understand the simple truth that he was standing there at the command of the infinite Spirit and not at the goading of his moral compunction to run away from God’s work. Such was the state of Krishna’s endeared disciple and a solution was to be found by the Godhead in the midst of a legendary gathering of formidable warriors on both sides.
Krishna begins with the idea of renouncing the fruits of action and seeking nothing in return but by asking his disciple to surrender all actions to Him first. The idea of renunciation of all action and their consequences thereof cannot be perfectly carried out by an external वैराग्य (Vairāgya) or even by a natural inner disposition, and if at all allowed to freely run its course under these conditions, it is more likely to lead us into non-action, a state of active तमस् (tamas), a stark and inept state of refusal to progress, but the human mind seeks to define action by individual and collective social norms and established standards, and therefore, suffers the consequences of its refusal and self-adamancy when it is so demanded of a higher action by the Divine. It is only in an absolute surrender lies an absolute perfection in action, and its result is a self-exceeding perception of all and everything, everything living and non-living as the highest Divine in the world and elsewhere, for God dwells even in those about to be vanquished, as was shown to Arjuna by Sri Krishna, and death is only an instance in an eternal Time-Consciousness. While asserting the freedom of spiritual action, the boundlessness of a direct divine action upon earth, Krishna also reveals the freedom of spiritual movement in which such a spiritual action becomes perfect expression of a boundless Spirit, a universal Godhead carrying the numerous eternal cycles in his vast bosom, adorning all his cosmic forms and the suns and the moons and the stars and the galaxies, a most high vision in which all eternities merge in an infinite Form no mind can fathom and no thought can trace. Thus, out of that vision rose the impulse to perfect divine action and drove Arjuna to decimate his opponents. The sense of the higher vision which the divine Godhead revealed to Arjuna is there in all of us, waiting for its moment when it could emerge forth and engulf us in a spiritual self-conquest.
The gist of the Gita on spiritual action, if it is possible to derive a brief summery of it to humankind, is that all action must proceed from a higher divine Truth, which is essentially free from the taints of human ego and self-importance, free from the notions of right and wrong and is infinitely supple and an expression of a greater delight. The nature of a bounded action is that it maims the spontaneous flow of the Spirit into things, retards the many-sided movement of a godward impulse to perfection and slows down the ascent of the individual, and because of it, the ascent of the collective humanity, into the nature of the divine Godhead. The solution lies in finding our support entirely in the heart of Sri Krishna and his vast Grace Light, அருட்பெரும் ஜோதி தனி பெரும் கருணை.
End of part 5
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
