Sri Aurobindo: But how is this desireless contact with objects, this unsensuous use of the senses possible? It is possible, , by the vision of the supreme, —, the Soul, the Purusha, — and by living in the Yoga, in union or oneness of the whole subjective being with that, through the Yoga of the intelligence; for the one Soul is calm, satisﬁed in its own delight, and that delight free from duality can take, once we see this supreme thing in us and ﬁx the mind and will on that, the place of the sensuous object-ridden pleasures and repulsions of the mind. This is the true way of liberation.  Certainly self-discipline, self-control is never easy. All intelligent human beings know that they must exercise some control over themselves and nothing is more common than this advice to control the senses; but ordinarily it is only advised imperfectly and practised imperfectly in the most limited and insufﬁcient fashion.


Sri Aurobindo: Even, however, the sage, the man of clear, wise and discerning soul who really labours to acquire complete self-mastery ﬁnds himself hurried and carried away by the senses. That is because the mind naturally lends itself to the senses; it observes the objects of sense with an inner interest, settles upon them and makes them the object of absorbing thought for the intelligence and of strong interest for the will. By that attachment comes, by attachment desire, by desire distress, passion and anger when the desire is not satisﬁed or is thwarted or opposed, and by passion the soul is obscured, the intelligence and will forget to see and be seated in the calm observing soul; there is a fall from the memory of one’s true self, and by that lapse the intelligent will is also obscured, destroyed even. For, for the time being, it no longer exists to our memory of ourselves, it disappears in a cloud of passion; we become passion, wrath, grief and cease to be self and intelligence and will. This then must be prevented and all the senses brought utterly under control; for only by an absolute control of the senses can the wise and calm intelligence be ﬁrmly established in its proper seat.


Sri Aurobindo: This cannot be done perfectly by the act of the intelligence itself, by a merely mental self-discipline; it can only be done by Yoga with something which is higher than itself and in which calm and self-mastery are inherent. And this Yoga can only arrive at its success by devoting, by consecrating, by giving up the whole self to the Divine, “to Me”, says Krishna; for the Liberator is within us, but it is not our mind, nor our intelligence, nor our personal will, — they are only instruments. It is the Lord in whom, as we are told in the end, we have utterly to take refuge.  And for that we must at ﬁrst make him the object of our whole being and keep in soul-contact with him. This is the sense of the phrase “he must sit ﬁrm in Yoga, wholly given up to Me”; but as yet it is the merest passing hint after the manner of the Gita, three words only which contain in seed the whole gist of the highest secret yet to be developed..


Sri Aurobindo: If this is done, then it becomes possible to move among the objects of sense, in contact with them, acting on them, but with the senses entirely under the control of the subjective self, — not at the mercy of the objects and their contacts and reactions, — and that self again obedient to the highest self, the Purusha. Then, free from reactions, the senses will be delivered from the affections of liking and disliking, escape the duality of positive and negative desire, and calm, peace, clearness, happy tranquillity,, will settle upon the man. That clear tranquillity is the source of the soul’s felicity; all grief begins to lose its power of touching the tranquil soul; the intelligence is rapidly established in the peace of the self; suffering is destroyed.  It is this calm, desireless, grieﬂess ﬁxity of the buddhi in selfpoise and self-knowledge to which the Gita gives the name of Samadhi.  The sign of the man in Samadhi is not that he loses consciousness of objects and surroundings and of his mental and physical self and cannot be recalled to it even by burning or torture of the body, — the ordinary idea of the matter; trance is a particular intensity, not the essential sign.


Sri Aurobindo: The test is the expulsion of all desires, their inability to get at the mind, and it is the inner state from which this freedom arises, the delight of the soul gathered within itself with the mind equal and still and highpoised above the attractions and repulsions, the alternations of sunshine and storm and stress of the external life. It is drawn inward even when acting outwardly; it is concentrated in self even when gazing out upon things; it is directed wholly to the Divine even when to the outward vision of others busy and preoccupied with the affairs of the world. Arjuna, voicing the average human mind, asks for some outward, physical, practically discernible sign of this great Samadhi; how does such a man speak, how sit, how walk? No such signs can be given, nor does the Teacher attempt to supply them; for the only possible test of its possession is inward and that there are plenty of hostile psychological forces to apply. Equality is the great stamp of the liberated soul and of that equality even the most discernible signs are still subjective.


Sri Aurobindo: “A man with mind untroubled by sorrows, who has done with desire for pleasures, from whom liking and wrath and fear have passed away, such is the sage whose understanding has become founded in stability.” He is “without the triple action of the qualities of Prakriti, without the dualities, ever based in his true being, without getting or having, possessed of his self.”  For what gettings and havings has the free soul? Once we are possessed of the Self, we are in possession of all things.  And yet he does not cease from work and action.


Sri Aurobindo: There is the originality and power of the Gita, that having afﬁrmed this static condition, this superiority to nature, this emptiness even of all that constitutes ordinarily the action of Nature for the liberated soul, it is still able to vindicate for it, to enjoin on it even the continuance of works and thus avoid the great defect of the merely quietistic and ascetic philosophies, — the defect from which we ﬁnd them today attempting to escape.  “Thou hast a right to action, but only to action, never to its fruits; let not the fruits of thy works be thy motive, neither let there be in thee any attachment to inactivity.” Therefore it is not the works practised with desire by the Vedavadins, it is not the claim for the satisfaction of the restless and energetic mind by a constant activity, the claim made by the practical or the kinetic man, which is here enjoined. “Fixed in Yoga do thy actions, having abandoned attachment, having become equal in failure and success; for it is equality that is meant by Yoga.” Action is distressed by the choice between a relative good and evil, the fear of sin and the difﬁcult endeavour towards virtue?


Sri Aurobindo: But the liberated who has united his reason and will with the Divine, casts away from him even here in this world of dualities both good doing and evil doing; for he rises to a higher law beyond good and evil, founded in the liberty of self-knowledge. Such desireless action can have no decisiveness, no effectiveness, no efﬁcient motive, no large or vigorous creative power? Not so; action done in Yoga is not only the highest but the wisest, the most potent and efﬁcient even for the affairs of the world; for it is informed by the knowledge and will of the Master of works: “Yoga is skill in works.” But all action directed towards life leads away from the universal aim of the Yogin which is by common consent to escape from bondage to this distressed and sorrowful human birth? Not so, either; the sages who do works without desire for fruits and in Yoga with the Divine are liberated from the bondage of birth and reach that other perfect status in which there are none of the maladies which afﬂict the mind and life of a suffering humanity.


Sri Aurobindo: The status he reaches is the Brahmic condition; he gets to ﬁrm standing in the Brahman,. It is a reversal of the whole view, experience, knowledge, values, seeings of earthbound creatures. This life of the dualities which is to them their day, their waking, their consciousness, their bright condition of activity and knowledge, is to him a night, a troubled sleep and darkness of the soul; that higher being which is to them a night, a sleep in which all knowledge and will cease, is to the self-mastering sage his waking, his luminous day of true being, knowledge and power. They are troubled and muddy waters disturbed by every little inrush of desire; he is an ocean of wide being and consciousness which is ever being ﬁlled, yet ever motionless in its large poise of his soul; all the desires of the world enter into him as waters into the sea, yet he has no desire nor is troubled. For while they are ﬁlled with the troubling sense of ego and mine and thine, he is one with the one Self in all and has no “I” or “mine”.


Sri Aurobindo: He acts as others, but he has abandoned all desires and their longings. He attains to the great peace and is not bewildered by the shows of things; he has extinguished his individual ego in the One, lives in that unity and, ﬁxed in that status at his end, can attain to extinction in the Brahman, Nirvana, — not the negative self-annihilation of the Buddhists, but the great immergence of the separate personal self into the vast reality of the one inﬁnite impersonal Existence.  Such, subtly unifying Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta, is the ﬁrst foundation of the teaching of the Gita. It is far from being all, but it is the ﬁrst indispensable practical unity of knowledge and works with a hint already of the third crowning intensest element in the soul’s completeness, divine love and devotion.  XI HE YOGA of the intelligent will and its culmination in the Brahmic status, which occupies all the close of the second chapter, contains the seed of much of the teaching of the Gita, — its doctrine of desireless works, of equality, of the rejection of outward renunciation, of devotion to the Divine; but as yet all this is slight and obscure.


Sri Aurobindo: What is most strongly emphasised as yet is the withdrawal of the will from the ordinary motive of human activities, desire, from man’s normal temperament of the sense-seeking thought and will with its passions and ignorance, and from its customary habit of troubled manybranching ideas and wishes to the desireless calm unity and passionless serenity of the Brahmic poise. So much Arjuna has understood. He is not unfamiliar with all this; it is the substance of the current teaching which points man to the path of knowledge and to the renunciation of life and works as his way of perfection. The intelligence withdrawing from sense and desire and human action and turning to the Highest, to the One, to the actionless Purusha, to the immobile, to the featureless Brahman, that surely is the eternal seed of knowledge. There is no room here for works, since works belong to the Ignorance; action is the very opposite of knowledge; its seed is desire and its fruit is bondage.


Sri Aurobindo: That is the orthodox philosophical doctrine, and Krishna seems quite to admit it when he says that works are far inferior to the Yoga of the intelligence. And yet works are insisted upon as part of the Yoga; so that there seems to be in this teaching a radical inconsistency. Not only so; for some kind of work no doubt may persist for a while, the minimum, the most inoffensive; but here is a work wholly inconsistent with knowledge, with serenity and with the motionless peace of the self-delighted soul, — a work terrible, even monstrous, a bloody strife, a ruthless battle, a giant massacre. Yet it is this that is enjoined, this that it is sought to justify by the teaching of inner peace and desireless equality and status in the Brahman! Here then is an unreconciled contradiction.


Sri Aurobindo: Arjuna complains that he has been given a contradictory and confusing doctrine, not the clear, strenuously single road by which the human intelligence can move straight and trenchantly to the supreme good. It is in answer to this objection that the Gita begins at once to develop more clearly its positive and imperative doctrine of Works.  The Teacher ﬁrst makes a distinction between the two means of salvation on which in this world men can concentrate separately, the Yoga of knowledge, the Yoga of works, the one implying, it is usually supposed, renunciation of works as an obstacle to salvation, the other accepting works as a means of salvation. He does not yet insist strongly on any fusion of them, on any reconciliation of the thought that divides them, but begins by showing that the renunciation of the Sankhyas, the physical renunciation, Sannyasa, is neither the only way, nor at all the better way., a calm voidness from works, is no doubt that to which the soul, the Purusha has to attain; for it is Prakriti which does the work and the soul has to rise above involution in the activities of the being and attain to a free serenity and poise watching over the operations of Prakriti, but not affected by them.


Sri Aurobindo: That, and not cessation of the works of Prakriti, is what is really meant by the soul’s.  Therefore it is an error to think that by not engaging in any kind of action this actionless state of the soul can be attained and enjoyed. Mere renunciation of works is not a sufﬁcient, not even quite a proper means for salvation. “Not by abstention from works does a man enjoy actionlessness, nor by mere renunciation (of works) does he attain to his perfection,” — to , the accomplishment of the aims of his self-discipline by Yoga.  But at least it must be one necessary means, indispensable, imperative?


Sri Aurobindo: For how, if the works of Prakriti continue, can the soul help being involved in them? How can I ﬁght and yet in my soul not think or feel that I the individual am ﬁghting, not desire victory nor be inwardly touched by defeat? This is the teaching of the Sankhyas that the intelligence of the man who engages in the activities of Nature, is entangled in egoism, ignorance and desire and therefore drawn to action; on the contrary, if the intelligence draws back, then the action must cease with the cessation of the desire and the ignorance. Therefore the giving up of life and works is a necessary part, an inevitable circumstance and an indispensable last means of the movement to liberation. This objection of a current logic, — it is not expressed by Arjuna, but it is in his mind as the turn of his subsequent utterances shows, — the Teacher immediately anticipates.


Sri Aurobindo: No, he says, such renunciation, far from being indispensable, is not even possible.  “For none stands even for a moment not doing work; everyone is made to do action helplessly by the modes born of Prakriti.”  The strong perception of the great cosmic action and the eternal activity and power of the cosmic energy which was so much emphasised afterwards by the teaching of the Tantric Shaktas who even made Prakriti or Shakti superior to Purusha, is a very remarkable feature of the Gita. Although here an undertone, it is still strong enough, coupled with what we might call the theistic and devotional elements of its thought, to bring in that activism which so strongly modiﬁes in its scheme of Yoga the quietistic tendencies of the old metaphysical Vedanta. Man embodied in the natural world cannot cease from action, not for a moment, not for a second; his very existence here is an action; the whole universe is an act of God, mere living even is His movement.


Sri Aurobindo: Our physical life, its maintenance, its continuance is a journey, a pilgrimage of the body,, and that cannot be effected without action. But even if a man could leave his body unmaintained, otiose, if he could stand still always like a tree or sit inert like a stone,, that vegetable or material immobility would not save him from the hands of Nature; he would not be liberated from her workings. For it is not our physical movements and activities alone which are meant by works, by ; our mental existence also is a great complex action, it is even the greater and more important part of the works of the unresting energy, — subjective cause and determinant of the physical. We have gained nothing if we repress the effect but retain the activity of the subjective cause. The objects of sense are only an occasion for our bondage, the mind’s insistence on them is the means, the instrumental cause.


Sri Aurobindo: A man may control his organs of action and refuse to give them their natural play, but he has gained nothing if his mind continues to remember and dwell upon the objects of sense. Such a man has bewildered himself with false notions of self-discipline; he has not understood its object or its truth, nor the ﬁrst principles of his subjective existence; therefore all his methods of self-discipline are false and null. The body’s actions, even the mind’s actions are nothing in themselves, neither a bondage, nor the ﬁrst cause of bondage.  What is vital is the mighty energy of Nature which will have her way and her play in her great ﬁeld of mind and life and body; what is dangerous in her, is the power of her three, modes or qualities to confuse and bewilder the intelligence and so obscure the soul. That, as we shall see later, is the whole crux of action and liberation for the Gita.


Sri Aurobindo: Be free from obscuration and bewilderment by the three and action can continue, as it must continue, and even the largest, richest or most enormous and violent action; it does not matter, for nothing then touches the Purusha, the soul has  But at present the Gita does not proceed to that larger point.  Since the mind is the instrumental cause, since inaction is impossible, what is rational, necessary, the right way is a controlled action of the subjective and objective organism. The mind must bring the senses under its control as an instrument of the intelligent will and then the organs of action must be used for their proper ofﬁce, for action, but for action done as Yoga. But what is the essence of this self-control, what is meant by action done as Yoga,?


Sri Aurobindo: It is non-attachment, it is to do works without clinging with the mind to the objects of sense and the fruit of the works. Not complete inaction, which is an error, a confusion, a self-delusion, an impossibility, but action full and free done without subjection to sense and passion, desireless and unattached works, are the ﬁrst secret of perfection. Do action thus self-controlled, says Krishna,   : I have said that knowledge, the intelligence, is greater than works,, but I did not mean that inaction is greater than action; the contrary is the truth, .


Sri Aurobindo: For knowledge does not mean renunciation of works, it means equality and non-attachment to desire and the objects of sense; and it means the poise of the intelligent will in the Soul free and high-uplifted above the lower instrumentation of Prakriti and controlling the works of the mind and the senses and body in the power of self-knowledge and the pure objectless self-delight of spiritual realisation,.  is fulﬁlled by; the Yoga of the self-liberating intelligent will ﬁnds its full meaning by the Yoga of desireless works.  Thus the Gita founds its teaching of the necessity of desireless works,, and unites the subjective practice of the Sankhyas — rejecting their merely physical rule — with the practice of Yoga.  But still there is an essential difﬁculty unsolved. Desire is the ordinary motive of all human actions, and if the soul is free from desire, then there is no farther rationale for action.


Sri Aurobindo: We may be compelled to do certain works for the maintenance of the body, but even that is a subjection to the desire of the body which we ought to get rid of if we are to attain perfection.  But granting that this cannot be done, the only way is to ﬁx  a rule for action outside ourselves, not dictated by anything in our subjectivity, the of the Vedic rule, the routine of ceremonial sacriﬁce, daily conduct and social duty, which the man who seeks liberation may do simply because it is enjoined upon him, without any personal purpose or subjective interest in them, with an absolute indifference to the doing, not because he is compelled by his nature but because it is enjoined by the Shastra . But if the principle of the action is not to be external to the nature but subjective, if the actions even of the liberated and the sage are to be controlled and determined by his nature, , then the only subjective principle of action is desire of whatever kind, lust of the ﬂesh or emotion of the heart or base or noble aim of the mind, but all subject to the of Prakriti.


Sri Aurobindo: Let us then interpret the of the Gita as the  of the Vedic rule, its or work that has to be done as the Aryan rule of social duty and let us take too its work done as a sacriﬁce to mean simply these Vedic sacriﬁces and this ﬁxed social duty performed disinterestedly and without any personal object. This is how the Gita’s doctrine of desireless work is often interpreted. But it seems to me that the Gita’s teaching is not so crude and simple, not so local and temporal and narrow as all that. It is large, free, subtle and profound; it is for all time and for all men, not for a particular age and country.  Especially, it is always breaking free from external forms, details, dogmatic notions and going back to principles and the great facts of our nature and our being.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a work of large philosophic truth and spiritual practicality, not of constrained religious and philosophical formulas and stereotyped dogmas.  The difﬁculty is this, how, our nature being what it is and desire the common principle of its action, is it possible to institute a really desireless action? For what we call ordinarily disinterested action is not really desireless; it is simply a replacement of certain smaller personal interests by other larger desires which have only the appearance of being impersonal, virtue, country, mankind. All action, moreover, as Krishna insists, is done by the of Prakriti, by our nature; in acting according to the Shastra we are still acting according to our nature, — even if this Shastric action is not, as it usually is, a mere cover for our desires, prejudices, passions, egoisms, our personal, national, sectarian vanities, sentiments and preferences; but even otherwise, even at the purest, still we obey a choice of our nature, and if our nature were different and the acted on our intelligence and will in some other combination , we would not accept the Shastra, but live according to our pleasure or our intellectual notions or else break free from the social law to live the life of the solitary or the ascetic.


Sri Aurobindo: We cannot become impersonal by obeying something outside ourselves, for we cannot so get outside ourselves; we can only do it by rising to the highest in ourselves, into our free Soul and Self which is the same and one in all and has therefore no personal interests, to the Divine in our being who possesses Himself transcendent of cosmos and is therefore not bound by His cosmic works or His individual action. That is what the Gita teaches and desirelessness is only a means to this end, not an aim in itself. Yes, but how is it to be brought about? By doing all works with sacriﬁce as the only object, is the reply of the divine Teacher. “By doing works otherwise than for sacriﬁce, this world of men is in bondage to works; for sacriﬁce practise works, O son of Kunti, becoming free from all attachment.”


Sri Aurobindo: It is evident that all works and not merely sacriﬁce and social duties can be done in this spirit; any action may be done either from the ego-sense narrow or enlarged or for the sake of the Divine.  All being and all action of Prakriti exist only for the sake of the Divine; from that it proceeds, by that it endures, to that it is directed. But so long as we are dominated by the ego-sense we cannot perceive or act in the spirit of this truth, but act for the satisfaction of the ego and in the spirit of the ego, otherwise than for sacriﬁce. Egoism is the knot of the bondage. By acting Godwards, without any thought of ego, we loosen this knot and ﬁnally arrive at freedom.


Sri Aurobindo: At ﬁrst, however, the Gita takes up the Vedic statement of the idea of sacriﬁce and phrases the law of sacriﬁce in its current terms. This it does with a deﬁnite object. We have seen that the quarrel between renunciation and works has two forms, the opposition of Sankhya and Yoga which is already in principle reconciled and the opposition of Vedism and Vedantism which the Teacher has yet to reconcile. The ﬁrst is a larger statement of the opposition in which the idea of works is general and wide.  The Sankhya starts from the notion of the divine status as that of the immutable and inactive Purusha which each soul is in reality and makes an opposition between inactivity of Purusha and activity of Prakriti; so its logical culmination is cessation of all works.


Sri Aurobindo: Yoga starts from the notion of the Divine as Ishwara, lord of the operations of Prakriti and therefore superior to them, and its logical culmination is not cessation of works but the soul’s superiority to them and freedom even though doing all works.  In the opposition of Vedism and Vedantism works,, are restricted to Vedic works and sometimes even to Vedic sacriﬁce and ritualised works, all else being excluded as not useful to salvation. Vedism of the Mimansakas insisted on them as the means, Vedantism taking its stand on the Upanishads looked on them as only a preliminary belonging to the state of ignorance and in the end to be overpassed and rejected, an obstacle to the seeker of liberation. Vedism worshipped the Devas, the gods, with sacriﬁce and held them to be the powers who assist our salvation. Vedantism was inclined to regard them as powers of the mental and material world opposed to our salvation (men, says the Upanishad, are the cattle of the gods, who do not desire man to know and be free); it saw the Divine as the immutable Brahman who has to be attained not by works of sacriﬁce and worship but by knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: Works only lead to material results and to an inferior Paradise; therefore they have to be renounced.  The Gita resolves this opposition by insisting that the Devas are only forms of the one Deva, the Ishwara, the Lord of all Yoga and worship and sacriﬁce and austerity, and if it is true that sacriﬁce offered to the Devas leads only to material results and to Paradise, it is also true that sacriﬁce offered to the Ishwara leads beyond them to the great liberation. For the Lord and the immutable Brahman are not two different beings, but one and the same Being, and whoever strives towards either, is striving towards that one divine Existence. All works in their totality ﬁnd their culmination and completeness in the knowledge of the Divine,.


Sri Aurobindo: They are not an obstacle, but the way to the supreme knowledge.  Thus this opposition too is reconciled with the help of a large elucidation of the meaning of sacriﬁce. In fact its conﬂict is only a restricted form of the larger opposition between Yoga and Sankhya. Vedism is a specialised and narrow form of Yoga; the principle of the Vedantists is identical with that of the Sankhyas, for to both the movement of salvation is the recoil of the intelligence, the, from the differentiating powers of Nature, from ego, mind, senses, from the subjective and the objective, and its return to the undifferentiated and the immutable. It is with this object of reconciliation in his mind that the Teacher ﬁrst approaches his statement of the doctrine of sacriﬁce; but throughout, even from the very beginning, he keeps his eye not on the restricted Vedic sense of sacriﬁce and works, but on their larger and universal application, — that widening of narrow and formal notions to admit the great general truths they unduly restrict which is always the method of the Gita.


Sri Aurobindo: XII HE GITA’S theory of sacriﬁce is stated in two separate passages; one we ﬁnd in the third chapter, another in the fourth; the ﬁrst gives it in language which might, taken by itself, seem to be speaking only of the ceremonial sacriﬁce; the second interpreting that into the sense of a large philosophical symbolism, transforms at once its whole signiﬁcance and raises it to a plane of high psychological and spiritual truth. “With sacriﬁce the Lord of creatures of old created creatures and said, By this shall you bring forth (fruits or offspring) , let this be your milker of desires. Foster by this the gods and let the gods foster you; fostering each other, you shall attain to the supreme good.  Fostered by sacriﬁce the gods shall give you desired enjoyments; who enjoys their given enjoyments and has not given to them, he is a thief.


Sri Aurobindo: The good who eat what is left from the sacriﬁce, are released from all sin; but evil are they and enjoy sin who cook (the food) for their own sake. From food creatures come into being, from rain is the birth of food, from sacriﬁce comes into being the rain, sacriﬁce is born of work; work know to be born of Brahman, Brahman is born of the Immutable; therefore is the all-pervading Brahman established in the sacriﬁce. He who follows not here the wheel thus set in movement, evil is his being, sensual is his delight, in vain, O Partha, that man lives.” Having thus stated the necessity of sacriﬁce, — we shall see hereafter in what sense we may understand a passage which seems at ﬁrst sight to convey only a traditional theory of ritualism and the necessity of the ceremonial offering, — Krishna proceeds to state the superiority of the spiritual man to works. “But the man whose delight is in the Self and who is satisﬁed with the enjoyment of the Self and in the Self he is content, for him there exists no work that needs to be done.


Sri Aurobindo: He has no object here to be gained by action done and none to be gained by action undone; he has no dependence on all these existences for any object to be gained.”  Here then are the two ideals, Vedist and Vedantist, standing as if in all their sharp original separation and opposition, on one side the active ideal of acquiring enjoyments here and the highest good beyond by sacriﬁce and the mutual dependence of the human being and the divine powers and on the other, facing it, the austerer ideal of the liberated man who, independent in the Spirit, has nothing to do with enjoyment or works or the human or the divine worlds, but exists only in the peace of the supreme Self, joys only in the calm joy of the Brahman. The next verses create a ground for the reconciliation between the two extremes; the secret is not inaction as soon as one turns towards the higher truth, but desireless action both before and after it is reached. The liberated man has nothing to gain by action, but nothing also to gain by inaction, and it is not at all for any personal object that he has to make his choice. “Therefore without attachment perform ever the work that is to be done (done for the sake of the world,, as is made clear immediately afterward); for by doing work without attachment man attains to the highest.


Sri Aurobindo: For it was even by works that Janaka and the rest attained to perfection.” It is true that works and sacriﬁce are a means of arriving at the highest good, ; but there are three kinds of works, that done without sacriﬁce for personal enjoyment which is entirely selﬁsh and egoistic and misses the true law and aim and utility of life, , that done with desire, but with sacriﬁce and the enjoyment only as a result of sacriﬁce and therefore to that extent consecrated and sanctiﬁed, and that done without desire or attachment of any kind. It is the last which brings the soul of man to the highest,.  The whole sense and drift of this teaching turns upon the interpretation we are to give to the important words,, ,, sacriﬁce, work, Brahman. If the sacriﬁce is simply the Vedic sacriﬁce, if the work from which it is born is the Vedic rule of works and if the from which the work itself is born is the in the sense only of the letter of the Veda, then all the positions of the Vedist dogma are conceded and there is nothing more.


Sri Aurobindo: Ceremonial sacriﬁce is the right means of gaining children, wealth, enjoyment; by ceremonial sacriﬁce rain is brought down from heaven and the prosperity and continuity of the race assured; life is a continual transaction between the gods and men in which man offers ceremonial gifts to the gods from the gifts they have bestowed on him and in return is enriched, protected, fostered. Therefore all human works have to be accompanied and turned into a sacrament by ceremonial sacriﬁce and ritualistic worship; work not so dedicated is accursed, enjoyment without previous ceremonial sacriﬁce and ritual consecration is a sin. Even salvation, even the highest good is to be gained by ceremonial sacriﬁce. It must never be abandoned. Even the seeker of liberation has to continue to do ceremonial sacriﬁce, although without attachment; it is by ceremonial sacriﬁce and ritualistic works done without attachment that men of the type of Janaka attained to spiritual perfection and liberation.


Sri Aurobindo: Obviously, this cannot be the meaning of the Gita, for it would be in contradiction with all the rest of the book. Even in the passage itself, without the illumining interpretation afterwards given to it in the fourth chapter, we have already an indication of a wider sense where it is said that sacriﬁce is born from work, work from, from the Akshara, and therefore the all-pervading Brahman,, is established in the sacriﬁce. The connecting logic of the “therefore” and the repetition of the word are signiﬁcant; for it shows clearly that the from which all work is born has to be understood with an eye not so much to the current Vedic teaching in which it means the Veda as to a symbolical sense in which the creative Word is identical with the all-pervading Brahman, the Eternal, the one Self present in all existences, , and present in all the workings of existence. The Veda is the knowledge of the Divine, the Eternal, — “I am He who is to be known in all the books of the Knowledge,”, Krishna will say in a subsequent chapter; but it is the knowledge of him in the workings of Prakriti, in the workings of the three , ﬁrst qualities or modes of Nature,.  This Brahman or Divine in the workings of Nature is born, as we may say, out of the Akshara, the immutable Purusha, the Self who stands above all the modes or qualities or workings of Nature,.


Sri Aurobindo: The Brahman is one but self-displayed in two aspects, the immutable Being and the creator and originator of works in the mutable becoming,,; it is the immobile omnipresent Soul of things and it is the spiritual principle of the mobile working of things, Purusha poised in himself and Purusha active in Prakriti; it is and. In both of these aspects the Divine Being, Purushottama, manifests himself in the universe; the immutable above all qualities is His poise of peace, self-possession, equality,; from that proceeds His manifestation in the qualities of Prakriti and their universal workings; from the Purusha in Prakriti, from this Brahman with qualities, proceed all the works of the universal energy, Karma, in man and in all existences; from that work proceeds the principle of sacriﬁce. Even the material interchange between gods and men proceeds upon this principle, as typiﬁed in the dependence of rain and its product food on this working and on them the physical birth of creatures. For all the working of Prakriti is in its true nature a sacriﬁce,, with the Divine Being as the enjoyer of all energisms and works and sacriﬁce and the great Lord of all existences, , and to know this Divine all-pervading and established in sacriﬁce,, is the true, the Vedic knowledge.  But he may be known in an inferior action through the , the gods, the powers of the divine Soul in Nature and in the eternal interaction of these powers and the soul of man, mutually giving and receiving, mutually helping, increasing, raising each other’s workings and satisfaction, a commerce in which man rises towards a growing ﬁtness for the supreme good.


Sri Aurobindo: He recognises that his life is a part of this divine action in Nature and not a thing separate and to be held and pursued for its own sake. He regards his enjoyments and the satisfaction of his desires as the fruit of sacriﬁce and the gift of the gods in their divine universal workings and he ceases to pursue them in the false and evil spirit of sinful egoistic selﬁshness as if they were a good to be seized from life by his own unaided strength without return and without thankfulness. As this spirit increases in him, he subordinates his desires, becomes satisﬁed with sacriﬁce as the law of life and works and is content with whatever remains over from the sacriﬁce, giving up all the rest freely as an offering in the great and beneﬁcent interchange between his life and the worldlife. Whoever goes contrary to this law of action and pursues works and enjoyment for his own isolated personal self-interest, lives in vain; he misses the true meaning and aim and utility of living and the upward growth of the soul; he is not on the path which leads to the highest good. But the highest only comes when the sacriﬁce is no longer to the gods, but to the one allpervading Divine established in the sacriﬁce, of whom the gods are inferior forms and powers, and when he puts away the lower self that desires and enjoys and gives up his personal sense of being the worker to the true executrix of all works, Prakriti, and his personal sense of being the enjoyer to the Divine Purusha, the higher and universal Self who is the real enjoyer of the works of Prakriti.


Sri Aurobindo: In that Self and not in any personal enjoyment he ﬁnds now his sole satisfaction, complete content, pure delight; he has nothing to gain by action or inaction, depends neither on gods nor men for anything, seeks no proﬁt from any, for the self-delight is all-sufﬁcient to him, but does works for the sake of the Divine only, as a pure sacriﬁce, without attachment or desire. Thus he gains equality and becomes free from the modes of Nature,; his soul takes its poise not in the insecurity of Prakriti, but in the peace of the immutable Brahman, even while his actions continue in the movement of Prakriti. Thus is sacriﬁce his way of attaining to the Highest.  That this is the sense of the passage is made clear in what follows, by the afﬁrmation of as the object of works, of Prakriti as the sole doer of works and the divine Purusha as their equal upholder, to whom works have to be given up even in their doing, — this inner giving up of works and yet physical doing of them is the culmination of sacriﬁce, — and by the afﬁrmation that the result of such active sacriﬁce with an equal and desireless mind is liberation from the bondage of works. “He who is satisﬁed with whatever gain comes to him and equal in failure and success, is not bound even when he acts.


Sri Aurobindo: When a man liberated, free from attachment, acts for sacriﬁce, all his action is dissolved,” leaves, that is to say, no result of bondage or after-impression on his free, pure, perfect and equal soul. To these passages we shall have to return. They are followed by a perfectly explicit and detailed interpretation of the meaning of in the language of the Gita which leaves no doubt at all about the symbolic use of the words and the psychological character of the sacriﬁce enjoined by this teaching. In the ancient Vedic system there was always a double sense physical and psychological, outward and symbolic, the exterior form of the sacriﬁce and the inner meaning of all its circumstances. But the secret symbolism of the ancient Vedic mystics, exact, curious, poetic, psychological, had been long forgotten by this time and it is now replaced by another, large, general and philosophical in the spirit of Vedanta and a later Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁre of sacriﬁce,, is no material ﬂame, but, the ﬁre of the Brahman, or it is the Brahman-ward energy, inner Agni, priest of the sacriﬁce, into which the offering is poured; the ﬁre is self-control or it is a puriﬁed sense-action or it is the vital energy in that discipline of the control of the vital being through the control of the breath which is common to Rajayoga and Hathayoga, or it is the ﬁre of self-knowledge, the ﬂame of the supreme sacriﬁce. The food eaten as the leavings of the sacriﬁce is, it is explained, the nectar of immortality,, left over from the offering; and here we have still something of the old Vedic symbolism in which the Soma-wine was the physical symbol of the, the immortalising delight of the divine ecstasy won by the sacriﬁce, offered to the gods and drunk by men. The offering itself is whatever working of his energy, physical or psychological, is consecrated by him in action of body or action of mind to the gods or God, to the Self or to the universal powers, to one’s own higher Self or to the Self in mankind and in all existences.  This elaborate explanation of the Yajna sets out with a vast and comprehensive deﬁnition in which it is declared that the act and energy and materials of the sacriﬁce, the giver and receiver of the sacriﬁce, the goal and object of the sacriﬁce are all the one Brahman. “Brahman is the giving, Brahman is the food-offering, by Brahman it is offered into the Brahman-ﬁre, Brahman is that which is to be attained by samadhi in Brahmanaction.”


Sri Aurobindo: This then is the knowledge in which the liberated man has to do works of sacriﬁce. It is the knowledge declared of old in the great Vedantic utterances, “I am He”, “All this verily is the Brahman, Brahman is this Self.” It is the knowledge of the entire unity; it is the One manifest as the doer and the deed and the object of works, knower and knowledge and the object of knowledge. The universal energy into which the action is poured is the Divine; the consecrated energy of the giving is the Divine; whatever is offered is only some form of the Divine; the giver of the offering is the Divine himself in man; the action, the work, the sacriﬁce is itself the Divine in movement, in activity; the goal to be reached by sacriﬁce is the Divine. For the man who has this knowledge and lives and acts in it, there can be no binding works, no personal and egoistically appropriated action; there is only the divine Purusha acting by the divine Prakriti in His own being, offering everything into the ﬁre of His self-conscious cosmic energy, while the knowledge and the possession of His divine existence and consciousness by the soul uniﬁed with Him is the goal of all this God-directed movement and activity.


Sri Aurobindo: To know that and to live and act in this unifying consciousness is to be free.  But all even of the Yogins have not attained to this knowledge. “Some Yogins follow after the sacriﬁce which is of the gods; others offer the sacriﬁce by the sacriﬁce itself into the Brahman-ﬁre.” The former conceive of the Divine in various forms and powers and seek him by various means, ordinances, , laws or, as we might say, settled rites of action, selfdiscipline, consecrated works; for the latter, those who already know, the simple fact of sacriﬁce, of offering whatever work to the Divine itself, of casting all their activities into the uniﬁed divine consciousness and energy, is their one means, their one . The means of sacriﬁce are various; the offerings are of many kinds.


Sri Aurobindo: There is the psychological sacriﬁce of self-control and self-discipline which leads to the higher self-possession and self-knowledge. “Some offer their senses into the ﬁres of control, others offer the objects of sense into the ﬁres of sense, and others offer all the actions of the sense and all the actions of the vital force into the ﬁre of the Yoga of self-control kindled by knowledge.” There is, that is to say, the discipline which receives the objects of sense-perception without allowing the mind to be disturbed or affected by its sense-activities, the senses themselves becoming pure ﬁres of sacriﬁce; there is the discipline which stills the senses so that the soul in its purity may appear from behind the veil of mind-action, calm and still; there is the discipline by which, when the self is known, all the actions of the senseperceptions and all the action of the vital being are received into that one still and tranquil soul. The offering of the striver after perfection may be material and physical,, like that consecrated in worship by the devotee to his deity, or it may be the austerity of his self-discipline and energy of his soul directed to some high aim,, or it may be some form of Yoga like the Pranayama of the Rajayogins and Hathayogins, or any other. All these tend to the puriﬁcation of the being; all sacriﬁce is a way towards the attainment of the highest.


Sri Aurobindo: The one thing needful, the saving principle constant in all these variations, is to subordinate the lower activities, to diminish the control of desire and replace it by a superior energy, to abandon the purely egoistic enjoyment for that diviner delight which comes by sacriﬁce, by self-dedication, by self-mastery, by the giving up of one’s lower impulses to a greater and higher aim.  “They who enjoy the nectar of immortality left over from the sacriﬁce attain to the eternal Brahman.” Sacriﬁce is the law of the world and nothing can be gained without it, neither mastery here, nor the possession of heavens beyond, nor the supreme possession of all; “this world is not for him who doeth not sacriﬁce, how then any other world?” Therefore all these and many other forms of sacriﬁce have been “extended in the mouth of the Brahman,” the mouth of that Fire which receives all offerings ; they are all means and forms of the one great Existence in activity, means by which the action of the human being can be offered up to That of which his outward existence is a part and with which his inmost self is one.


Sri Aurobindo: They are “all born of work”; all proceed from and are ordained by the one vast energy of the Divine which manifests itself in the universal and makes all the cosmic activity a progressive offering to the one Self and Lord and of which the last stage for the human being is self-knowledge and the possession of the divine or Brahmic consciousness. “So knowing thou shalt become free.”  But there are gradations in the range of these various forms of sacriﬁce, the physical offering the lowest, the sacriﬁce of knowledge the highest. Knowledge is that in which all this action culminates, not any lower knowledge, but the highest, selfknowledge and God-knowledge, that which we can learn from those who know the true principles of existence, that by possessing which we shall not fall again into the bewilderment of the mind’s ignorance and into its bondage to mere sense-knowledge and to the inferior activity of the desires and passions. The knowledge in which all culminates is that by which “thou shalt see all existences (becomings,) without exception in the Self, then in Me.”


Sri Aurobindo: For the Self is that one, immutable, all-pervading, all-containing, self-existent reality or Brahman hidden behind our mental being into which our consciousness widens out when it is liberated from the ego; we come to see all beings as becomings,, within that one self-existence.  But this Self or immutable Brahman we see too to be the self-presentation to our essential psychological consciousness of a supreme Being who is the source of our existence and of whom all that is mutable or immutable is the manifestation. He is God, the Divine, the Purushottama. To Him we offer everything as a sacriﬁce; into His hands we give up our actions; in His existence we live and move; uniﬁed with Him in our nature and with all existence in Him, we become one soul and one power of being with Him and with all beings; with His supreme reality we identify and unite our self-being. By works done for sacriﬁce, eliminating desire, we arrive at knowledge and at the soul’s possession of itself; by works done in self-knowledge and Godknowledge we are liberated into the unity, peace and joy of the divine existence.


Sri Aurobindo: XIII E HAVE, before we can proceed further, to gather up all that has been said in its main principles. The whole of the Gita’s gospel of works rests upon its idea of sacriﬁce and contains in fact the eternal connecting truth of God and the world and works. The human mind seizes ordinarily only fragmentary notions and standpoints of a manysided eternal truth of existence and builds upon them its various theories of life and ethics and religion, stressing this or that sign or appearance, but to some entirety of it it must always tend to reawaken whenever it returns in an age of large enlightenment to any entire and synthetic relation of its world-knowledge with its God-knowledge and self-knowledge. The gospel of the Gita reposes upon this fundamental Vedantic truth that all being is the one Brahman and all existence the wheel of Brahman, a divine movement opening out from God and returning to God.  All is the expressive activity of Nature and Nature a power of the Divine which works out the consciousness and will of the divine Soul master of her works and inhabitant of her forms.


Sri Aurobindo: It is for his satisfaction that she descends into the absorption of the forms of things and the works of life and mind and returns again through mind and self-knowledge to the conscious possession of the Soul that dwells within her. There is ﬁrst an involving of self and all it is or means in an evolution of phenomena; there is afterwards an evolution of self, a revelation of all it is and means, all that is hidden and yet suggested by the phenomenal creation. This cycle of Nature could not be what it is but for the Purusha assuming and maintaining simultaneously three eternal poises each of which is necessary to the totality of this action.  It must manifest itself in the mutable, and there we see it as the ﬁnite, the many, all existences,. It appears to us as the ﬁnite personality of these million creatures with their inﬁnite diversities and various relations and it appears to us behind these as the soul and force of the action of the gods, — that is to say, the cosmic powers and qualities of the Divine which preside over the workings of the life of the universe and constitute to our perception different universal forms of the one Existence, or, it may be, various self-statements of personality of the one supreme Person.


Sri Aurobindo: Then, secret behind and within all forms and existences, we perceive too an immutable, an inﬁnite, a timeless, an impersonal, a one unchanging spirit of existence, an indivisible Self of all that is, in which all these many ﬁnd themselves to be really one. And therefore by returning to that the active, ﬁnite personality of the individual being discovers that it can release itself into a silent largeness of universality and the peace and poise of an immutable and unattached unity with all that proceeds from and is supported by this indivisible Inﬁnite. Or even he may escape into it from individual existence. But the highest secret of all,, is the Purushottama. This is the supreme Divine, God, who possesses both the inﬁnite and the ﬁnite and in whom the personal and the impersonal, the one Self and the many existences, being and becoming, the world-action and the supracosmic peace, and, meet, are united, are possessed together and in each other.


Sri Aurobindo: In God all things ﬁnd their secret truth and their absolute reconciliation.  All truth of works must depend upon the truth of being. All active existence must be in its inmost reality a sacriﬁce of works offered by Prakriti to Purusha, Nature offering to the supreme and inﬁnite Soul the desire of the multiple ﬁnite Soul within her. Life is an altar to which she brings her workings and the fruits of her workings and lays them before whatever aspect of the Divinity the consciousness in her has reached for whatever result of the sacriﬁce the desire of the living soul can seize on as its immediate or its highest good. According to the grade of consciousness and being which the soul has reached in Nature, will be the Divinity it worships, the delight which it seeks and the hope for which it sacriﬁces.


Sri Aurobindo: And in the movement of the mutable Purusha in Nature all is and must be interchange; for existence is one and its divisions must found themselves on some law of mutual dependence, each growing by each and living by all. Where sacriﬁce is not willingly given, Nature exacts it by force, she satisﬁes the law of her living. A mutual giving and receiving is the law of Life without which it cannot for one moment endure, and this fact is the stamp of the divine creative Will on the world it has manifested in its being, the proof that with sacriﬁce as their eternal companion the Lord of creatures has created all these existences. The universal law of sacriﬁce is the sign that the world is of God and belongs to God and that life is his dominion and house of worship and not a ﬁeld for the self-satisfaction of the independent ego; not the fulﬁlment of the ego, — that is only our crude and obscure beginning, — but the discovery of God, the worship and seeking of the Divine and the Inﬁnite through a constantly enlarging sacriﬁce culminating in a perfect self-giving founded on a perfect self-knowledge, is that to which the experience of life is at last intended to lead.  But the individual being begins with ignorance and persists long in ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: Acutely conscious of himself he sees the ego as the cause and whole meaning of life and not the Divine. He sees himself as the doer of works and does not see that all the workings of existence including his own internal and external activities are the workings of one universal Nature and nothing else. He sees himself as the enjoyer of works and imagines that for him all exists and him Nature ought to satisfy and obey his personal will; he does not see that she is not at all concerned with satisfying him or at all careful of his will, but obeys a higher universal will and seeks to satisfy a Godhead who transcends her and her works and creations; his ﬁnite being, his will and his satisfactions are hers and not his, and she offers them at every moment as a sacriﬁce to the Divine of whose purpose in her she makes all this the covert instrumentation. Because of this ignorance whose seal is egoism, the creature ignores the law of sacriﬁce and seeks to take all he can for himself and gives only what Nature by her internal and external compulsion forces him to give. He can really take nothing except what she allows him to receive as his portion, what the divine Powers within her yield to his desire.


Sri Aurobindo: The egoistic soul in a world of sacriﬁce is as if a thief or robber who takes what these Powers bring to him and has no mind to give in return. He misses the true meaning of life and, since he does not use life and works for the enlargement and elevation of his being through sacriﬁce, he lives in vain.  Only when the individual being begins to perceive and acknowledge in his acts the value of the self in others as well as the power and needs of his own ego, begins to perceive universal Nature behind his own workings and through the cosmic godheads gets some glimpse of the One and the Inﬁnite, is he on his way to the transcendence of his limitation by the ego and the discovery of his soul. He begins to discover a law other than that of his desires, to which his desires must be more and more subordinated and subjected; he develops the purely egoistic into the understanding and ethical being. He begins to give more value to the claims of the self in others and less to the claims of his ego; he admits the strife between egoism and altruism and by the increase of his altruistic tendencies he prepares the enlargement of his own consciousness and being.


Sri Aurobindo: He begins to perceive Nature and divine Powers in Nature to whom he owes sacriﬁce, adoration, obedience, because it is by them and by their law that the workings both of the mental and the material world are controlled, and he learns that only by increasing their presence and their greatness in his thought and will and life can he himself increase his powers, knowledge, right action and the satisfactions which these things bring to him. Thus he adds the religious and supraphysical to the material and egoistic sense of life and prepares himself to rise through the ﬁnite to the Inﬁnite.  But this is only a long intermediate stage. It is still subject to the law of desire, to the centrality of all things in the conceptions and needs of his ego and to the control of his being as well as his works by Nature, though it is a regulated and governed desire, a clariﬁed ego and a Nature more and more subtilised and enlightened by the sattwic, the highest natural principle. All this is still within the domain, though the very much enlarged domain, of the mutable, ﬁnite and personal.


Sri Aurobindo: The real self-knowledge and consequently the right way of works lies beyond; for the sacriﬁce done with knowledge is the highest sacriﬁce and that alone brings a perfect working. That can only come when he perceives that the self in him and the self in others are one being and this self is something higher than the ego, an inﬁnite, an impersonal, a universal existence in whom all move and have their being, — when he perceives that all the cosmic gods to whom he offers his sacriﬁce are forms of one inﬁnite Godhead and when again, leaving all his limited and limiting conceptions of that one Godhead, he perceives him to be the supreme and ineffable Deity who is at once the ﬁnite and the inﬁnite, the one self and the many, beyond Nature though manifesting himself through Nature, beyond limitation by qualities though formulating the power of his being through inﬁnite quality. This is the Purushottama to whom the sacriﬁce has to be offered, not for any transient personal fruit of works, but for the soul’s possession of God and in order to live in harmony and union with the Divine.  In other words, man’s way to liberation and perfection lies through an increasing impersonality. It is his ancient and constant experience that the more he opens himself to the impersonal and inﬁnite, to that which is pure and high and one and common in all things and beings, the impersonal and inﬁnite in Nature, the impersonal and inﬁnite in life, the impersonal and inﬁnite in his own subjectivity, the less he is bound by his ego and by the circle of the ﬁnite, the more he feels a sense of largeness, peace, pure happiness.


Sri Aurobindo: The pleasure, joy, satisfaction which the ﬁnite by itself can give or the ego in its own right attain, is transitory, petty and insecure. To dwell entirely in the ego-sense and its ﬁnite conceptions, powers, satisfactions is to ﬁnd this world for ever full of transience and suffering,;  the ﬁnite life is always troubled by a certain sense of vanity for this fundamental reason that the ﬁnite is not the whole or the highest truth of life; life is not entirely real until it opens into the sense of the inﬁnite. It is for this reason that the Gita opens its gospel of works by insisting on the Brahmic consciousness, the impersonal life, that great object of the discipline of the ancient sages. For the impersonal, the inﬁnite, the One in which all the impermanent, mutable, multiple activity of the world ﬁnds above itself its base of permanence, security and peace, is the immobile Self, the Akshara, the Brahman.


Sri Aurobindo: If we see this, we shall see that to raise one’s consciousness and the poise of one’s being out of limited personality into this inﬁnite and impersonal Brahman is the ﬁrst spiritual necessity. To see all beings in this one Self is the knowledge which raises the soul out of egoistic ignorance and its works and results; to live in it is to acquire peace and ﬁrm spiritual foundation.  The way to bring about this great transformation follows a double path; for there is the way of knowledge and there is the way of works, and the Gita combines them in a ﬁrm synthesis. The way of knowledge is to turn the understanding, the intelligent will away from its downward absorption in the workings of the mind and the senses and upward to the self, the Purusha or Brahman; it is to make it dwell always on the one idea of the one Self and not in the many-branching conceptions of the mind and many-streaming impulses of desire. Taken by itself this path would seem to lead to the complete renunciation of works, to an immobile passivity and to the severance of the soul from Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: But in reality such an absolute renunciation, passivity and severance are impossible. Purusha and Prakriti are twin principles of being which cannot be severed, and so long as we remain in Nature, our workings in Nature must continue, even though they may take a different form or rather a different sense from those of the unenlightened soul. The real renunciation — for renunciation,, there must be — is not the ﬂeeing from works, but the slaying of ego and desire.  The way is to abandon attachment to the fruit of works even while doing them, and the way is to recognise Nature as the agent and leave her to do her works and to live in the soul as the witness and sustainer, watching and sustaining her, but not attached either to her actions or their fruits. The ego, the limited and troubled personality is then quieted and merged in the consciousness of the one impersonal Self, while the works of Nature continue to our vision to operate through all these “becomings” or existences who are now seen by us as living and acting and moving, under her impulsion entirely, in this one inﬁnite Being; our own ﬁnite existence is seen and felt to be only one of these and its workings are seen and felt to be those of Nature, not of our real self which is the silent, impersonal unity.


Sri Aurobindo: The ego claimed them as its own doings and therefore we thought them ours; but the ego is now dead and henceforth they are no longer ours, but Nature’s. We have achieved by the slaying of ego impersonality in our being and consciousness; we have achieved by the renunciation of desire impersonality in the works of our nature. We are free not only in inaction, but in action; our liberty does not depend on a physical and temperamental immobility and vacancy, nor do we fall from freedom directly we act. Even in a full current of natural action the impersonal soul in us remains calm, still and free.  The liberation given by this perfect impersonality is real, is complete, is indispensable; but is it the last word, the end of the whole matter?


Sri Aurobindo: All life, all world-existence, we have said, is the sacriﬁce offered by Nature to the Purusha, the one and secret soul in Nature, in whom all her workings take place; but its real sense is obscured in us by ego, by desire, by our limited, active, multiple personality. We have risen out of ego and desire and limited personality and by impersonality, its great corrective, we have found the impersonal Godhead; we have identiﬁed our being with the one self and soul in whom all exist. The sacriﬁce of works continues, conducted not by ourselves any longer, but by Nature, — Nature operating through the ﬁnite part of our being, mind, senses, body, — but in our inﬁnite being. But to whom then is this sacriﬁce offered and with what object? For the impersonal has no activity and no desires, no object to be gained, no dependence for anything on all this world of creatures; it exists for itself, in its own self-delight, in its own immutable eternal being.


Sri Aurobindo: We may have to do works without desire as a means in order to reach this impersonal self-existence and selfdelight, but, that movement once executed, the object of works is ﬁnished; the sacriﬁce is no longer needed. Works may even then continue because Nature continues and her activities; but there is no longer any further object in these works. The sole reason for our continuing to act after liberation is purely negative; it is the compulsion of Nature on our ﬁnite parts of mind and body.  But if that be all, then, ﬁrst, works may well be whittled down and reduced to a minimum, may be conﬁned to what Nature’s compulsion absolutely will have from our bodies; and secondly, even if there is no reduction to a minimum, — since action does not matter and inaction also is no object, — then the nature of the works also does not matter. Arjuna, once having attained knowledge, may continue to ﬁght out the battle of Kurukshetra, following his old Kshatriya nature, or he may leave it and live the life of the Sannyasin, following his new quietistic impulse.


Sri Aurobindo: Which of these things he does, becomes quite indifferent; or rather the second is the better way, since it will discourage more quickly the impulses of Nature which still have a hold on his mind owing to past created tendency and, when his body has fallen from him, he will securely depart into the Inﬁnite and Impersonal with no necessity of returning again to the trouble and madness of life in this transient and sorrowful world,  If this were so, the Gita would lose all its meaning; for its ﬁrst and central object would be defeated. But the Gita insists that the nature of the action does matter and that there is a positive sanction for continuance in works, not only that one quite negative and mechanical reason, the objectless compulsion of Nature. There is still, after the ego has been conquered, a divine Lord and enjoyer of the sacriﬁce,, and there is still an object in the sacriﬁce. The impersonal Brahman is not the very last word, not the utterly highest secret of our being; for impersonal and personal, ﬁnite and inﬁnite turn out to be only two opposite, yet concomitant aspects of a divine Being unlimited by these distinctions who is both these things at once.


Sri Aurobindo: God is an ever unmanifest Inﬁnite ever self-impelled to manifest himself in the ﬁnite; he is the great impersonal Person of whom all personalities are partial appearances; he is the Divine who reveals himself in the human being, the Lord seated in the heart of man. Knowledge teaches us to see all beings in the one impersonal self, for so we are liberated from the separative ego-sense, and then through this delivering impersonality to see them in this God,, “in the Self and then in Me.” Our ego, our limiting personalities stand in the way of our recognising the Divine who is in all and in whom all have their being; for, subject to personality, we see only such fragmentary aspects of Him as the ﬁnite appearances of things suffer us to seize. We have to arrive at him not through our lower personality, but through the high, inﬁnite and impersonal part of our being, and that we ﬁnd by becoming this self one in all in whose existence the whole world is comprised. This inﬁnite containing, not excluding all ﬁnite appearances, this impersonal admitting, not rejecting all individualities and personalities, this immobile sustaining, pervading, containing, not standing apart from all the movement of Nature, is the clear mirror in which the Divine will reveal His being.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore it is to the Impersonal that we have ﬁrst to attain; through the cosmic deities, through the aspects of the ﬁnite alone the perfect knowledge of God cannot be totally obtained. But neither is the silent immobility of the impersonal Self, conceived as shut into itself and divorced from all that it sustains, contains and pervades, the whole allrevealing all-satisfying truth of the Divine. To see that we have to look through its silence to the Purushottama, and he in his divine greatness possesses both the Akshara and the Kshara; he is seated in the immobility, but he manifests himself in the movement and in all the action of cosmic Nature; to him even after liberation the sacriﬁce of works in Nature continues to be offered.  The real goal of the Yoga is then a living and self-completing union with the divine Purushottama and is not merely a selfextinguishing immergence in the impersonal Being. To raise our whole existence to the Divine Being, to dwell in him ( ), to be at one with him, unify our consciousness with his, to make our fragmentary nature a reﬂection of his perfect nature, to be inspired in our thought and sense wholly by the divine knowledge, to be moved in will and action utterly and faultlessly by the divine will, to lose desire in his love and delight, is man’s perfection; it is that which the Gita describes as the highest secret.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the true goal and the last sense of human living and the highest step in our progressive sacriﬁce of works.  For he remains to the end the master of works and the soul of sacriﬁce.  XIV HIS THEN is the sense of the Gita’s doctrine of sacriﬁce. Its full signiﬁcance depends on the idea of the Purushottama which as yet is not developed, — we ﬁnd it set forth clearly only much later in the eighteen chapters, — and therefore we have had to anticipate, at whatever cost of inﬁdelity to the progressive method of the Gita’s exposition, that central teaching. At present the Teacher simply gives a hint, merely adumbrates this supreme presence of the Purushottama and his relation to the immobile Self in whom it is our ﬁrst business, our pressing spiritual need to ﬁnd our poise of perfect peace and equality by attainment to the Brahmic condition.


Sri Aurobindo: He speaks as yet not at all in set terms of the Purushottama, but of himself, — “I”, Krishna, Narayana, the Avatar, the God in man who is also the Lord in the universe incarnated in the ﬁgure of the divine charioteer of Kurukshetra. “In the Self, then in Me,” is the formula he gives, implying that the transcendence of the individual personality by seeing it as a “becoming” in the impersonal self-existent Being is simply a means of arriving at that great secret impersonal Personality, which is thus silent, calm and uplifted above Nature in the impersonal Being, but also present and active in Nature in all these million becomings.  Losing our lower individual personality in the Impersonal, we arrive ﬁnally at union with that supreme Personality which is not separate and individual, but yet assumes all individualities.  Transcending the lower nature of the three gunas and seating the soul in the immobile Purusha beyond the three gunas, we can ascend ﬁnally into the higher nature of the inﬁnite Godhead which is not bound by the three gunas even when it acts through Nature. Reaching the inner actionlessness of the silent Purusha, , and leaving Prakriti to do her works, we can attain supremely beyond to the status of the divine Mastery which is able to do all works and yet be bound by none.


Sri Aurobindo: The idea of the Purushottama, seen here as the incarnate Narayana, Krishna, is therefore the key. Without it the withdrawal from the lower nature to the Brahmic condition leads necessarily to inaction of the liberated man, his indifference to the works of the world; with it the same withdrawal becomes a step by which the works of the world are taken up in the spirit, with the nature and in the freedom of the Divine. See the silent Brahman as the goal and the world with all its activities has to be forsaken; see God, the Divine, the Purushottama as the goal, superior to action yet its inner spiritual cause and object and original will, and the world with all its activities is conquered and possessed in a divine transcendence of the world. It can become instead of a prison-house an opulent kingdom,, which we have conquered for the spiritual life by slaying the limitation of the tyrant ego and overcoming the bondage of our gaoler desires and breaking the prison of our individualistic possession and enjoyment. The liberated universalised soul becomes , self-ruler and emperor.


Sri Aurobindo: The works of sacriﬁce are thus vindicated as a means of liberation and absolute spiritual perfection,. So Janaka and other great Karmayogins of the mighty ancient Yoga attained to perfection, by equal and desireless works done as a sacriﬁce, without the least egoistic aim or attachment — . So too and with the same desirelessness, after liberation and perfection, works can and have to be continued by us in a large divine spirit, with the calm high nature of a spiritual royalty. “Thou shouldst do works regarding also the holding together of the peoples, . Whatsoever the Best doeth, that the lower kind of man puts into practice; the standard he creates, the people follows.


Sri Aurobindo: O son of Pritha, I have no work that I need to do in all the three worlds, I have nothing that I have not gained and have yet to gain, and I abide verily in the paths of action,”, — implying, I abide in it and do not leave it as the Sannyasin thinks himself bound to abandon works. “For if I did not abide sleeplessly in the paths of action, men follow in every way my path, these peoples would sink to destruction if I did not works and I should be the creator of confusion and slay these creatures. As those who know not act with attachment to the action, he who knows should act without attachment, having for his motive to hold together the peoples. He should not create a division of their understanding in the ignorant who are attached to their works; he should set them to all actions, doing them himself with knowledge and in Yoga.” There are few more important passages in the Gita than these seven striking couplets.


Sri Aurobindo: But let us clearly understand that they must not be interpreted, as the modern pragmatic tendency concerned much more with the present affairs of the world than with any high and far-off spiritual possibility seeks to interpret them, as no more than a philosophical and religious justiﬁcation of social service, patriotic, cosmopolitan and humanitarian effort and attachment to the hundred eager social schemes and dreams which attract the modern intellect. It is not the rule of a large moral and intellectual altruism which is here announced, but that of a spiritual unity with God and with this world of beings who dwell in him and in whom he dwells. It is not an injunction to subordinate the individual to society and humanity or immolate egoism on the altar of the human collectivity, but to fulﬁl the individual in God and to sacriﬁce the ego on the one true altar of the allembracing Divinity. The Gita moves on a plane of ideas and experiences higher than those of the modern mind which is at the stage indeed of a struggle to shake off the coils of egoism, but is still mundane in its outlook and intellectual and moral rather than spiritual in its temperament. Patriotism, cosmopolitanism, service of society, collectivism, humanitarianism, the ideal or religion of humanity are admirable aids towards our escape from our primary condition of individual, family, social, national egoism into a secondary stage in which the individual realises, as far as it can be done on the intellectual, moral and emotional level, — on that level he cannot do it entirely in the right and perfect way, the way of the integral truth of his being, — the oneness of his existence with the existence of other beings.


Sri Aurobindo: But the thought of the Gita reaches beyond to a tertiary condition of our developing self-consciousness towards which the secondary is only a partial stage of advance.  The Indian social tendency has been to subordinate the individual to the claims of society, but Indian religious thought and spiritual seeking have been always loftily individualistic in their aims. An Indian system of thought like the Gita’s cannot possibly fail to put ﬁrst the development of the individual, the highest need of the individual, his claim to discover and exercise his largest spiritual freedom, greatness, splendour, royalty, — his aim to develop into the illumined seer and king in the spiritual sense of seerdom and kingship, which was the ﬁrst great charter of the ideal humanity promulgated by the ancient Vedic sages.  To exceed himself was their goal for the individual, not by losing all his personal aims in the aims of an organised human society, but by enlarging, heightening, aggrandising himself into the consciousness of the Godhead. The rule given here by the Gita is the rule for the master man, the superman, the divinised human being, the Best, not in the sense of any Nietzschean, any onesided and lopsided, any Olympian, Apollonian or Dionysian, any angelic or demoniac supermanhood, but in that of the man whose whole personality has been offered up into the being, nature and consciousness of the one transcendent and universal Divinity and by loss of the smaller self has found its greater self, has been divinised.


Sri Aurobindo: To exalt oneself out of the lower imperfect Prakriti, , into unity with the divine being, consciousness and nature,, is the object of the Yoga. But when this object is fulﬁlled, when the man is in the Brahmic status and sees no longer with the false egoistic vision himself and the world, but sees all beings in the Self, in God, and the Self in all beings, God in all beings, what shall be the action, — since action there still is, — which results from that seeing, and what shall be the cosmic or individual motive of all his works? It is the question of Arjuna, but answered from a standpoint other than that from which Arjuna had put it. The motive cannot be personal desire on the intellectual, moral, emotional level, for that has been abandoned, — even the moral motive has been abandoned, since the liberated man has passed beyond the lower distinction of sin and virtue, lives in a gloriﬁed purity beyond good and evil. It cannot be the spiritual call to his perfect self-development by means of disinterested works, for the call has been answered, the development is perfect and fulﬁlled.


Sri Aurobindo: His motive of action can only be the holding together of the peoples,. This great march of the peoples towards a far-off divine ideal has to be held together, prevented from falling into the bewilderment, confusion and utter discord of the understanding which would lead to dissolution and destruction and to which the world moving forward in the night or dark twilight of ignorance would be too easily prone if it were not held together, conducted, kept to the great lines of its discipline by the illumination, by the strength, by the rule and example, by the visible standard and the invisible inﬂuence of its Best. The best, the individuals who are in advance of the general line and above the general level of the collectivity, are the natural leaders of mankind, for it is they who can point to the race both the way they must follow and the standard or ideal they have to keep to or to attain. But the divinised man is the Best in no ordinary sense of the word and his inﬂuence, his example must have a power which that of no ordinarily superior man can exercise. What example then shall he give?


Sri Aurobindo: What rule or standard shall he uphold?  In order to indicate more perfectly his meaning, the divine Teacher, the Avatar gives his own example, his own standard to Arjuna. “I abide in the path of action,” he seems to say, “the path that all men follow; thou too must abide in action. In the way I act, in that way thou too must act. I am above the necessity of works, for I have nothing to gain by them; I am the Divine who possess all things and all beings in the world and I am myself beyond the world as well as in it and I do not depend upon anything or anyone in all the three worlds for any object; yet I act.


Sri Aurobindo: This too must be thy manner and spirit of working. I, the Divine, am the rule and the standard; it is I who make the path in which men tread; I am the way and the goal. But I do all this largely, universally, visibly in part, but far more invisibly; and men do not really know the way of my workings. Thou, when thou knowest and seest, when thou hast become the divinised man, must be the individual power of God, the human yet divine example, even as I am in my avatars. Most men dwell in the ignorance, the God-seer dwells in the knowledge; but let him not confuse the minds of men by a dangerous example, rejecting in his superiority the works of the world; let him not cut short the thread of action before it is spun out, let him not perplex and falsify the stages and gradations of the ways I have hewn.


Sri Aurobindo: The whole range of human action has been decreed by me with a view to the progress of man from the lower to the higher nature, from the apparent undivine to the conscious Divine. The whole range of human works must be that in which the God-knower shall move. All individual, all social action, all the works of the intellect, the heart and the body are still his, not any longer for his own separate sake, but for the sake of God in the world, of God in all beings and that all those beings may move forward, as he has moved, by the path of works towards the discovery of the Divine in themselves. Outwardly his actions may not seem to differ essentially from theirs; battle and rule as well as teaching and thought, all the various commerce of man with man may fall in his range; but the spirit in which he does them must be very different, and it is that spirit which by its inﬂuence shall be the great attraction drawing men upwards to his own level, the great lever lifting the mass of men higher in their ascent.”  The giving of the example of God himself to the liberated man is profoundly signiﬁcant; for it reveals the whole basis of the Gita’s philosophy of divine works.


Sri Aurobindo: The liberated man is he who has exalted himself into the divine nature and according to that divine nature must be his actions. But what is the divine nature?  It is not entirely and solely that of the Akshara, the immobile, inactive, impersonal self; for that by itself would lead the liberated man to actionless immobility. It is not characteristically that of the Kshara, the multitudinous, the personal, the Purusha self-subjected to Prakriti; for that by itself would lead him back into subjection to his personality and to the lower nature and its qualities. It is the nature of the Purushottama who holds both these together and by his supreme divinity reconciles them in a divine reconciliation which is the highest secret of his being,  He is not the doer of works in the personal sense of our action involved in Prakriti; for God works through his power, conscious nature, effective force, — Shakti, Maya, Prakriti, — but yet above it, not involved in it, not subject to it, not unable to lift himself beyond the laws, workings, habits of action it creates, not affected or bound by them, not unable to distinguish himself, as we are unable, from the workings of life, mind and body.


Sri Aurobindo: He is the doer of works who acts not, . “Know me,” says Krishna, “for the doer of this (the fourfold law of human workings) who am yet the imperishable non-doer. Works ﬁx not themselves on me (), nor have I desire for the fruits of action.” But neither is he the inactive, impassive, unpuissant Witness and nothing else; for it is he who works in the steps and measures of his power; every movement of it, every particle of the world of beings it forms is instinct with his presence, full of his consciousness, impelled by his will, shaped by his knowledge.  He is, besides, the Supreme without qualities who is possessed of all qualities,.


Sri Aurobindo: He is not bound by any mode of nature or action, nor consists, as our personality consists, of a sum of qualities, modes of nature, characteristic operations of the mental, moral, emotional, vital, physical being, but is the source of all modes and qualities, capable of developing any he wills in whatever way and to whatever degree he wills; he is the inﬁnite being of which they are ways of becoming, the immeasurable quantity and unbound ineffable of which they are measures, numbers and ﬁgures, which they seem to rhythmise and arithmise in the standards of the universe. Yet neither is he merely an impersonal indeterminate, nor a mere stuff of conscious existence for all determinations and personalisings to draw upon for their material, but a supreme Being, the one original conscious Existent, the perfect Personality capable of all relations even to the most human, concrete and intimate; for he is friend, comrade, lover, playmate, guide, teacher, master, ministrant of knowledge or ministrant of joy, yet in all relations unbound, free and absolute. This too the divinised man becomes in the measure of his attainment, impersonal in his personality, unbound by quality or action even when maintaining the most personal and intimate relations with men, unbound by any even when following in appearance this or that . Neither the dynamism of the kinetic man nor the actionless light of the ascetic or quietist, neither the vehement personality of the man of action nor the indifferent impersonality of the philosophic sage is the complete divine ideal. These are the two conﬂicting standards of the man of this world and the ascetic or the quietist philosopher, one immersed in the action of the Kshara, the other striving to dwell entirely in the peace of the Akshara; but the complete divine ideal proceeds from the nature of the Purushottama which transcends this conﬂict and reconciles all divine possibilities.


Sri Aurobindo: The kinetic man is not satisﬁed with any ideal which does not depend upon the fulﬁlment of this cosmic nature, this play of the three qualities of that nature, this human activity of mind and heart and body. The highest fulﬁlment of that activity, he might say, is my idea of human perfection, of the divine possibility in man; some ideal that satisﬁes the intellect, the heart, the moral being, some ideal of our human nature in its action can alone satisfy the human being; he must have something that he can seek in the workings of his mind and life and body. For that is his nature, his, and how can he be fulﬁlled in something outside his nature? For to his nature each being is bound and within it he must seek for his perfection. According to our human nature must be our human perfection; and each man must strive for it according to the line of his personality, his, but in life, in action, not outside life and action. Yes, there is a truth in that, replies the Gita; the fulﬁlment of God in man, the play of the Divine in life is part of the ideal perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: But if you seek it only in the external, in life, in the principle of action, you will never ﬁnd it; for you will then not only act according to your nature, which is in itself a rule of perfection, but you will be — and this is a rule of the imperfection — eternally subject to its modes, its dualities of liking and dislike, pain and pleasure and especially to the rajasic mode with its principle of desire and its snare of wrath and grief and longing, — the restless, alldevouring principle of desire, the insatiable ﬁre which besieges your worldly action, the eternal enemy of knowledge by which it is covered over here in your nature as is a ﬁre by smoke or a mirror by dust and which you must slay in order to live in the calm, clear, luminous truth of the spirit. The senses, mind and intellect are the seat of this eternal cause of imperfection and yet it is within this sense, mind and intellect, this play of the lower nature that you would limit your search for perfection!   The effort is vain. The kinetic side of your nature must ﬁrst seek to add to itself the quietistic; you must uplift yourself beyond this lower nature to that which is above the three gunas, that which is founded in the highest principle, in the soul.


Sri Aurobindo: Only when you have attained to peace of soul, can you become capable of a free and divine action.  The quietist, the ascetic, on the other hand cannot see any possibility of perfection into which life and action enter. Are they not the very seat of bondage and imperfection? Is not all action imperfect in its nature, like a ﬁre that must produce smoke, is not the principle of action itself rajasic, the father of desire, a cause that must have its effect of obscuration of knowledge, its round of longing and success and failure, its oscillations of joy and grief, its duality of virtue and sin? God may be in the world, but he is not of the world; he is a God of renunciation and not the Master or cause of our works; the master of our works is desire and the cause of works is ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: If the world, the Kshara is in a sense a manifestation or a of the Divine, it is an imperfect play with the ignorance of Nature, an obscuration rather than a manifestation. That is surely evident from our very ﬁrst glance at the nature of the world and does not the fullest experience of the world teach us always the same truth? is it not a wheel of the ignorance binding the soul to continual birth by the impulse of desire and action until at last that is exhausted or cast away? Not only desire, but action also must be ﬂung away; seated in the silent self the soul will then pass away into the motionless, actionless, imperturbable, absolute Brahman. To this objection of the impersonalising quietist the Gita is at more pains to answer than to that of the man of the world, the kinetic individual.


Sri Aurobindo: For this quietism having hold of a higher and more powerful truth which is yet not the whole or the highest truth, its promulgation as the universal, complete, highest ideal of human life is likely to be more confusing and disastrous to the advance of the human race towards its goal than the error of an exclusive kinetism. A strong one-sided truth, when set forth as the whole truth, creates a strong light but also a strong confusion; for the very strength of its element of truth increases the strength of its element of error. The error of the kinetic ideal can only prolong the ignorance and retard the human advance by setting it in search of perfection where perfection cannot be found; but the error of the quietistic ideal contains in itself the very principle of world-destruction. Were I to act upon it, says Krishna, I should destroy the peoples and be the author of confusion; and though the error of an individual human being, even though a nearly divine man, cannot destroy the whole race, it may produce a widespread confusion which may be in its nature destructive of the principle of human life and disturbing to the settled line of its advance.  Therefore the quietistic tendency in man must be got to recognise its own incompleteness and admit on an equality with itself the truth which lies behind the kinetic tendency, — the fulﬁlment of God in man and the presence of the Divine in all the action of the human race.


Sri Aurobindo: God is there not only in the silence, but in the action; the quietism of the impassive soul unaffected by Nature and the kinetism of the soul giving itself to Nature so that the great world-sacriﬁce, the Purusha-Yajna, may be effected, are not a reality and a falsehood in perpetual struggle nor yet two hostile realities, one superior, the other inferior, each fatal to the other; they are the double term of the divine manifestation. The Akshara alone is not the whole key of their fulﬁlment, not the very highest secret. The double fulﬁlment, the reconciliation is to be sought in the Purushottama represented here by Krishna, at once supreme Being, Lord of the worlds and Avatar. The divinised man entering into his divine nature will act even as he acts; he will not give himself up to inaction. The Divine is at work in man in the ignorance and at work in man in the knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: To know Him is our soul’s highest welfare and the condition of its perfection, but to know and realise Him as a transcendent peace and silence is not all; the secret that has to be learned is at once the secret of the eternal and unborn Divine and the secret of the divine birth and works, . The action which proceeds from that knowledge, will be free from all bondage; “he who so knoweth me,” says the Teacher, “is not bound by works.” If the escape from the obligation of works and desire and from the wheel of rebirth is to be the aim and the ideal, then this knowledge is to be taken as the true, the broad way of escape; for , says the Gita, “he who knows in their right principles my divine birth and works, comes when he leaves his body, not to rebirth, but to Me, O Arjuna.” Through the knowledge and possession of the divine birth he comes to the unborn and imperishable Divine who is the self of all beings,; through the knowledge and execution of divine works to the Master of works, the lord of all beings,.


Sri Aurobindo: He lives in that unborn being; his works are those of that universal Mastery.  XV N SPEAKING of this Yoga in which action and knowledge become one, the Yoga of the sacriﬁce of works with knowledge, in which works are fulﬁlled in knowledge, knowledge supports, changes and enlightens works, and both are offered to the Purushottama, the supreme Divinity who becomes manifest within us as Narayana, Lord of all our being and action seated secret in our hearts for ever, who becomes manifest even in the human form as the Avatar, the divine birth taking possession of our humanity, Krishna has declared in passing that this was the ancient and original Yoga which he gave to Vivasvan, the Sun-God, Vivasvan gave it to Manu, the father of men, Manu gave it to Ikshvaku, head of the Solar line, and so it came down from royal sage to royal sage till it was lost in the great lapse of Time and is now renewed for Arjuna, because he is the lover and devotee, friend and comrade of the Avatar. For this, he says, is the highest secret, — thus claiming for it a superiority to all other forms of Yoga, because those others lead to the impersonal Br


Sri Aurobindo: ahman or to a personal Deity, to a liberation in actionless knowledge or a liberation in absorbed beatitude , but  this gives the highest secret and the whole secret; it brings us to divine peace and divine works, to divine knowledge, action and ecstasy uniﬁed in a perfect freedom; it unites into itself all the Yogic paths as the highest being of the Divine reconciles and makes one in itself all the different and even contrary powers and principles of its manifested being. Therefore this Yoga of the Gita is not, as some contend, only the Karmayoga, one and the lowest, according to them, of the three paths, but a highest Yoga synthetic and integral directing Godward all the powers of our being.


Sri Aurobindo: Arjuna takes the declaration about the transmission of the Yoga in its most physical sense, — there is another signiﬁcance in which it can be taken, — and asks how the Sun-God, one of the ﬁrst-born of beings, ancestor of the Solar dynasty, can have received the Yoga from the man Krishna who is only now born into the world. Krishna does not reply, as we might have expected him to have done, that it was as the Divine who is the source of all knowledge that he gave the Word to the Deva who is his form of knowledge, giver of all inner and outer light, — ; he accepts instead the opportunity which Arjuna gives him of declaring his concealed Godhead, a declaration for which he had prepared when he gave himself as the divine example for the worker who is not bound by his works, but which he has not yet quite explicitly made. He now openly announces himself as the incarnate Godhead, the Avatar.  We have had occasion already, when speaking of the divine Teacher, to state brieﬂy the doctrine of Avatarhood as it appears to us in the light of Vedanta, the light in which the Gita presents it to us. We must now look a little more closely at this Avatarhood and at the signiﬁcance of the divine Birth of which it is the outward expression; for that is a link of considerable importance in the integral teaching of the Gita.


Sri Aurobindo: And we may ﬁrst translate the words of the Teacher himself in which the nature and purpose of Avatarhood are given summarily and remind ourselves also of other passages or references which bear upon it. “Many are my lives that are past, and thine also, O Arjuna; all of them I know, but thou knowest not, O scourge of the foe. Though I am the unborn, though I am imperishable in my self-existence, though I am the Lord of all existences, yet I stand upon my own Nature and I come into birth by my self-Maya. For whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then I loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of the good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning of the Right I am born from age to age.


Sri Aurobindo: He who knoweth thus in its right principles my divine birth and my divine work, when he abandons his body, comes not to rebirth, he comes to Me, O Arjuna. Delivered from liking and fear and wrath, full of me, taking refuge in me, many puriﬁed by austerity of knowledge have arrived at my nature of being (, the divine nature of the Purushottama). As men approach me, so I accept them to my love (); men follow in every way my path, O son of Pritha.”  But most men, the Gita goes on to say, desiring the fulﬁlment of their works, sacriﬁce to the gods, to various forms and personalities of the one Godhead, because the fulﬁlment () that is born of works, — of works without knowledge, — is very swift and easy in the human world; it belongs indeed to that world alone. The other, the divine self-fulﬁlment in man by the sacriﬁce with knowledge to the supreme Godhead, is much more difﬁcult; its results belong to a higher plane of existence and they are less easily grasped.


Sri Aurobindo: Men therefore have to follow the fourfold law of their nature and works and on this plane of mundane action they seek the Godhead through his various qualities. But, says Krishna, though I am the doer of the fourfold works and creator of its fourfold law, yet I must be known also as the non-doer, the imperishable, the immutable Self. “Works affect me not, nor have I desire for the fruit of works;” for God is the impersonal beyond this egoistic personality and this strife of the modes of Nature, and as the Purushottama also, the impersonal Personality, he possesses this supreme freedom even in works. Therefore the doer of divine works even while following the fourfold law has to know and live in that which is beyond, in the impersonal Self and so in the supreme Godhead.  “He who thus knows me is not bound by his works.