The Sign and Symbol of a Teacher
The Sense of The Bhagavad Gītā
The Guru is a symbol of an all-round perfection, a divine Connoisseur of immense depth and knowledge of both the Spirit and the world; he is also a symbol of a free Spirit beyond the idea of individual liberation, though he himself passes through the stages of human evolution in order to demonstrate the possibilities of spiritual self-transcendence, and to understand the sign and symbol of his perfection must form the basis of our search for a truer knowledge and illumination from the Gita, which points us towards a clearer understanding of the role of a divine teacher in the lives of aspiring men and to extricate out of its complex structure and deeper wisdom the vision of a greater divine Knowledge for our own pragmatic conduct in life, and finally, to seek through its divine synthesis our deliverance out of this painful ignorance and falsehood.
While there is a great deal of mystery attached to the process of Avatarhood, which our frail mental instruments cannot fathom, it is indeed possible to extract a synthetic understanding of the results of such a process, not by our mental instruments of knowledge but by an inward surrender and aspiration; it is there one sees the practical movement of a spiritual emanation in the form of a divine Guru and a process of a divine Guruhood in the human mould with all its limitations and difficulties, but not without its divine power of self-conquest of all human difficulties and the eventual surmounting of the whole human nature to serve as a self-effective instrument of the Divine.
The Divine assumes or encases the human mould by way of evolving himself out of all these terrestrial ruckus, passes through the stages necessary for self-development into a divine individual, and He does all these things without least pretension and colourful miracles. The difficulty of an embodied existence here in the terrestrial is for Him as real as it is for all of us, but He also conquers it with his heightened knowledge of Yoga Siddhi and leads those around Him or attached to His nature to a greater harmony of self-existence in the divine Spirit. In the knowledge of Yoga, he dwells as the Seer of all wisdom and presides over all actions of Prakriti.
The human aspect of a Guru, however seemingly incomplete to the external eye, especially to Western sensibilities which seek always to measure greatness by an outward grandeur and mental brilliance, is only a self-limited expression of the Divine in order to seek the world and its multitude of forms by a faithful assumption of its myriad difficulties, but rarely sees a man the infinite Form or divine Persona behind the human element, as did Arjuna or so was revealed to him by Sri Krishna. In other words, this human aspect does not limit the limitless effulgence of the infinite Form, and it reveals itself to the seeker only when he has reached a certain pinnacle of spiritual growth within, but it also depends on the Divine Grace, which acts only as and when it deems it.
This necessary understanding of God as our Guru, or if not God, a human agency through which the higher Divine acts, is imperative to understanding its importance and spiritual indispensability in the world in which we live. But such an understanding does not come forth by intellectual analysis of the divine Persona or by seeking through the external forms our inner support and higher benediction. Neither a need for the Guru is felt as imperative or indispensable by the modern mind, steeped and enamoured of scientific discoveries, but little it knows of the profound depths of man, in which resides a marvel, a living miracle which the Guru brings forth into the surface for the seeker to see and live in it constantly.
For, the Guru embodies the higher knowledge of the Spirit and is an expression of the personal Divine in a form that the human mind can understand and relate to, but the Divine in the human form subjects himself to the world without pretension and lets his natural aura to be penetrated by a thousand and one forces, subjects himself to attacks of various kinds and wounded perpetually in the process, and he does this in the knowledge that in order to be able to help humanity, he must himself assume the difficulties of the world and subject himself to the natural processes of lower Prakriti, until he has conquered her with his infinite wisdom and power of becoming. This difficult sacrifice he does for man in the hope that he may rise into a higher nature and so command the freedom of the Spirit.
The advent of Sri Krishna was a decisive turning point in the history of Indian civilisation; it was a marked departure from an esoteric tradition into a more open and vibrant social order in which the Guru-shishya relationship assumed a different nature and importance, but for those who doubt the historicity of Sri Krishna this may not sound like a valid argument, just as the historicity of Christ, which may be true, holds no importance whatsoever as a decisive turning in our history or culture, and the present Abrahamic tendencies are no proof of a culturally fallen Nation, but only an expression of a canker eating slowly into our vital systems.
The tradition and culture of India are still intact somewhere in their secret forms and are waiting for their decisive moments to express themselves with a certain seal and stamp of the Divine Grace. And, if we look closely enough, we may see that the development of Sri Krishna into a divine Guru follows the rigour of both inner and outer discipline, follows the precepts of conscious Yoga and the art of warfare among other things and follows the law of evolution common to all human species. His divine self-transcendence here was not a freak show or a demonstration of his natural Siddhis, but a certain system and principle of Yoga founded on a vast and infinite knowledge and self-experience for all of us to follow and be benefited from. This was the knowledge that Sri Krishna imparted to Arjuna, to stand tall among men, not out of unspiritual ego but out of the Self, by the Self and for the Self. But the Lord of the Gita also provides us with a view of the world and its secrets, aims to consolidate them into a spiritual synthesis and harmony of existence, but not without war and inevitable bloodshed, for the Kshatriya temper must be given its due course of action to run over and extinguish all forms of adharma or the law of the Asura, when all other privileges and options offered are rejected by the lower ego.
The need of war and bloodshed, their pragmatic use and utility, if any, must be seen from a higher viewpoint in which these human discords have no place and justification, but from the pressure of conflicting circumstances and conditions of the world the possibilities of such discords and contradictions seems justified of their existence, unless here we have already established a higher power of the Spirit in its absoluteness and harmony of existence. Till then, these discords, contradictions, cruelties etc. have to be met with a certain higher response, which seeks to alter such circumstances and conditions by a harmonious flow of energy into them to persuade them to turn towards light and knowledge of the Spirit, but when they are unwilling and recalcitrant to change, it moves to dismantle them by its inherent knowledge and truth, to which the Kshatriya becomes an instrument of divine action upon the earth. And, Arjuna was not an unwilling instrument or lesser in the intensity of his commitment to the cause of his Guru, the divine Godhead standing with him in the battlefield, but Arjuna was overcome by a moral repugnance and debilitating weakness to the idea of slaughtering his own kin, and still more painful, because he had been asked to be very instrument of destruction in the name of the Divine.
Man’s sense of morality and his mutual regard of fellow beings is measured often by his outer education and exposure to the circumstances and conditions around him, and they often determine the outcome of his action, which is either predominantly moral or ethical or both, or exorbitantly cruel and self-maiming in nature, and it is out of these lot a few set of exceptional individual must emerge and transcend the limitations of their nature by the grace and help of a spiritual Guru. But the roots of attachment go deep and remain unnoticed in the great process of spiritual self-ascent, and while one ascends into the nature of a higher Godhead, there lurks on the ground the prowling devil of all our human goodness and empathy and pulls the lower end of his being into an utter darkness of self or “the fever of the soul” as Sri Aurobindo calls it; it throws him into orderless confusion, self-despair and incapacitation of will-power, prevents him from acting out of a godward impulse towards what is supremely right, and it is out of this self-despair and weakness of self that the Kshatriya warrior must rise into the strength of the divine Guide.
The Guru enables the difficult transition from all weakness of self to a supreme strength of the Spirit, and this he does it by working out the difficulties in himself first before working them out for others, for he is a living embodiment of the highest Spirit here in the terrestrial consciousness. But the transition to a higher order of existence, to a greater knowledge of the Self, to a dynamic strength of a greater Spirit does not come by an occult process of Yoga and its results or by our unwavering fidelity to its processes; it comes by the grace of the divine Teacher, who in his supreme knowledge of Yoga or Yoga Siddhi guides the aspirant towards the right knowledge and action above as well as below in the terrestrial kurukshetra. The dangers of untrained or unguided yogic powers are too catastrophic to be taken lightly, and no Yoga can be truly possible or done effectively without the grace and guidance of the immanent Divine, and Sri Krishna is a symbol of an infinitely progressive perfection of the Spirit in the evolution of consciousness.
Sri Krishna is also symbolic of a certain higher action of a progressive Avatarhood, and to confine Avatarhood to a few exceptional cases of divine manifestation or seek to terminate the process when there seems to be no scope of a progressive divine manifestation or even to disbelieve in such a divine possibility in these present circumstances, is an error of judgement and a myopic understanding of the thinking mind, for, the process of Avatarhood is a secret and does not reveal itself to common men and their limited intelligence. It is only under exceptional circumstances that the manifestation of divine Avatarhood becomes apparent, but only to a few. It is to those very few men that the divine Teacher reveals himself initially, until the world is ready for him and his supreme Light.
End of part 4
The sense of the Bhagavad Gita — Introduction
The sense of the Bhagavad Gita — Sense of Nationalism
