TWENTY
Equality and Knowledge
YOGA
and knowledge are, in this early part of the Gita's teaching, the two wings of
the soul's ascent. By Yoga is meant union through divine works done without
desire, with equality of soul to all things and all men, as a sacrifice to the
Supreme, while knowledge is that on which this desirelessness, this equality,
this power of sacrifice is founded. The two wings indeed assist each other's
flight; acting together, yet with a subtle alternation of mutual aid, like the
two eyes in a man which see together because they see alternately, they
increase one another mutually by interchange of substance. As the works grow more
and more desireless, equal-minded, sacrificial in spirit, the knowledge
increases; with the increase of the knowledge the soul becomes firmer in the
desireless, sacrificial equality of its works. The sacrifice of knowledge, says
the Gita therefore, is greater than any material sacrifice. “Even if thou art
the greatest doer of sin beyond all sinners, thou shalt cross over all the
crookedness of evil in the ship of knowledge. . . . There is nothing in the world equal in purity
to knowledge.” By knowledge desire and its first-born child, sin, are
destroyed. The liberated man is able to do works as a sacrifice because he is
freed from attachment through his mind, heart and spirit being firmly founded
in self-knowledge, gata-sangasya muktasya
jñānāvasthitacetasah. All his work disappears completely
as soon as done, suffers laya, as one
might say, in the being of the Brahman, pravīlīyate;
it has no reactionary consequence on the soul of the apparent doer. The work is
done by the Lord through his Nature, it is no longer personal to the human
instrument. The work itself becomes but power of the nature and substance of
the being of the Brahman.
It is in this
sense that the Gita is speaking when it says that all the totality of work
finds its completion, culmination, end in
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knowledge, sarvam karmākhilam jñāne parisamāpyate. “As a fire
kindled turns to ashes its fuel, so the fire of knowledge turns all works to
ashes.” By this it is not at all meant that when knowledge is complete, there
is cessation from works. What is meant is made clear by the Gita when it says
that he who has destroyed all doubt by knowledge and has by Yoga given up all
works and is in possession of the Self is not bound by his works, yoga-sannyasta-karmānam ātmavantam
na karmāni nibadhnanti, and that he whose self has become the self
of all existences, acts and yet is not affected by his works, is not caught in
them, receives from them no soul-ensnaring reaction, kurvann api na lipyate. Therefore, it says, the Yoga of works is
better than the physical renunciation of works, because, while Sannyasa is
difficult for embodied beings who must do works so long as they are in the
body, Yoga of works is entirely sufficient and it rapidly and easily brings the
soul to Brahman. That Yoga of works is, we have seen, the offering of all action
to the Lord, which induces as its culmination an inner and not an outer, a
spiritual, not a physical giving up of works into the Brahman, into the being
of the Lord, brahmani ādhāya karmāni, mayi
sannyasya. When works are thus “reposed on the Brahman,” the personality of
the instrumental doer ceases; though he acts, he does nothing; for he has given
up not only the fruits of his works, but the works themselves and the doing of
them to the Lord. The Divine then takes the burden of works from him; the Supreme
becomes the doer and the act and the result.
This knowledge
of which the Gita speaks, is not an intellectual activity of the mind; it is a
luminous growth into the highest state of being by the outshining of the light
of the divine sun of Truth, “that Truth, the Sun lying concealed in the darkness”
of our ignorance of which the Rigveda speaks, tat satyam sūryam tamasi ksiyantam. The immutable
Brahman is there in the spirit's skies above this troubled lower nature of the
dualities, untouched either by its virtue or by its sin, accepting neither our
sense of sin nor our self-righteousness, untouched by its joy and its sorrow,
indifferent to our joy in success and our grief in failure, master of all,
supreme, all-pervading, prabhu vibhu,
calm, strong, pure, equal in all things, the source of Nature, not the direct
doer
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of our works, but the witness of
Nature and her works, not imposing on us either the illusion of being the doer,
for that illusion is the result of the ignorance of this lower Nature. But this
freedom, mastery, purity we cannot see; we are bewildered by the natural
ignorance which hides from us the eternal self-knowledge of the Brahman secret
within our being. But knowledge comes to its persistent seeker and removes the
natural self-ignorance; it shines out like a long-hidden sun and lights up to
our vision that self-being supreme beyond the dualities of this lower
existence, ādityavat prakāśayati
tat param. By a long whole-hearted endeavour, by directing our whole
conscious being to that, by making that our whole aim, by turning it into the
whole object of our discerning mind and so seeing it not only in ourselves but
everywhere, we become one thought and self with that, tadbuddhayas tadātmānah, we are washed clean of
all the darkness and suffering of the lower man by the waters of knowledge,¹ jñāna-nirdhūta-kalmasāh.
The result is,
says the Gita, a perfect equality to all things and all persons; and then only
can we repose our works completely in the Brahman. For the Brahman is equal, samam brahma, and it is only when we
have this perfect equality, sāamye
sthitam manah, “seeing with an equal eye the learned and cultured
Brahmin, the cow, the elephant, the dog, the outcaste” and knowing all as one
Brahman, that we can, living in that oneness, see like the Brahman our works
proceeding from the nature freely without any fear of attachment, sin or
bondage. Sin and stain then cannot be; for we have overcome that creation full
of desire and its works and reactions which belongs to the ignorance, tair jitah sargah, and
living in the supreme and divine Nature there is no longer fault or defect in
our works; for these are created by the inequalities of the ignorance. The
equal Brahman is faultless, nirdosam
hi samam brahma, beyond the confusion
of good and evil, and living in the Brahman we too rise beyond good and evil;
we act in that purity, stainlessly, with an equal and single purpose of
fulfilling the welfare of all existences,
¹The Rigveda so speaks of the
streams of the Truth, the waters that have perfect knowledge, the waters that
are full of the divine sunlight, rtasya
dhārāh, āpo vicetasah, svarvatīr apah.
What are here metaphors, are there concrete symbols.
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ksīnakalmasāh sarvabhūta-hite
ratāh. The Lord in our hearts is in the ignorance also the
cause of our actions, but through his Maya, through the egoism of our lower
nature which creates the tangled web of our actions and brings back upon our
egoism the recoil of their tangled reactions affecting us inwardly as sin and
virtue, affecting us outwardly as suffering and pleasure, evil fortune and good
fortune, the great chain of Karma. When we are freed by knowledge, the Lord, no
longer hidden in our hearts, but manifest as our supreme self, takes up our
works and uses us as faultless instruments, nimitta-mātram,
for the helping of the world. Such is the intimate union between knowledge and equality;
knowledge here in the buddhi
reflected as equality in the temperament; above, on a higher plane of
consciousness, knowledge as the light of the Being, equality as the stuff of
the Nature.
Always in this
sense of a supreme self-knowledge is this word jñāna used in Indian philosophy and Yoga; it is the light by
which we grow into our true being, not the knowledge by which we increase our
information and our intellectual riches; it is not scientific or psychological
or philosophic or ethical or aesthetic or worldly and practical knowledge.
These too no doubt help us to grow, but only in the becoming, not in the being;
they enter into the definition of Yogic knowledge only when we use them as aids
to know the Supreme, the Self, the Divine, – scientific knowledge, when we can
get through the veil of processes and phenomena and see the one Reality behind
which explains them all; psychological knowledge, when we use it to know
ourselves and to distinguish the lower from the higher, so that this we may
renounce and into that we may grow; philosophical knowledge, when we turn it as
a light upon the essential principles of existence so as to discover and live in
that which is eternal; ethical knowledge, when by it having distinguished sin
from virtue we put away the one and rise above the other into the pure
innocence of the divine Nature; aesthetic knowledge, when we discover by it the
beauty of the Divine; knowledge of the world, when we see through it the way of
the Lord with his creatures and use it for the service of the Divine in man.
Even then they are only aids; the real knowledge is that which is
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a secret to the mind, of which
the mind only gets reflections, but which lives in the spirit.
The Gita in
describing how we come by this knowledge, says that we get first initiation
into it from the men of knowledge who have seen, not those who know merely by
the intellect, its essential truths; but the actuality of it comes from within
ourselves: “the man who is perfected by Yoga, finds it of himself in the self
by the course of Time,” it grows within him, that is to say, and he grows into
it as he goes on increasing in desirelessness, in equality, in devotion to the
Divine. It is only of the supreme knowledge that this can altogether be said;
the knowledge which the intellect of man amasses, is gathered laboriously by
the senses and the reason from outside. To get this other knowledge,
self-existent, intuitive, self-experiencing, self-revealing, we must have
conquered and controlled our mind and senses, samyatendriyah, so that we are no longer subject to their
delusions, but rather the mind and senses become its pure mirror; we must have
fixed our whole conscious being on the truth of that supreme reality in which
all exists, tatparāh, so
that it may display in us its luminous self-existence.
Finally, we must
have a faith which no intellectual doubt can be allowed to disturb, śraddhāvān labhate jñānam.
“The ignorant who has not faith, the soul of doubt goeth to perdition; neither
this world, nor the supreme world, nor any happiness is for the soul full of
doubts.” In fact, it is true that without faith nothing decisive can be
achieved either in this world or for possession of the world above, and that it
is only by laying hold of some sure basis and positive support that man can
attain any measure of terrestrial or celestial success and satisfaction and
happiness; the merely sceptical mind loses itself in the void. But still in the
lower knowledge doubt and scepticism have their temporary uses; in the higher
they are stumbling-blocks: for there the whole secret is not the balancing of
truth and error, but a constantly progressing realisation of revealed truth. In
intellectual knowledge there is always a mixture of falsehood or incompleteness
which has to be got rid of by subjecting the truth itself to sceptical inquiry;
but in the higher knowledge falsehood cannot enter and that which intellect
contributes by
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attaching itself to this or that
opinion, cannot be got rid of by mere questioning, but will fall away of itself
by persistence in realisation. Whatever incompleteness there is in the
knowledge attained, it must be got rid of, not by questioning in its roots what
has already been realised, but by proceeding to further and more complete
realisation through a deeper, higher and wider living in the Spirit. And what
is not yet realised must be prepared for by faith, not by sceptical
questioning, because this truth is one which the intellect cannot give and
which is indeed often quite opposed to the ideas in which the reasoning and
logical mind gets entangled: it is not a truth which has to be proved, but a
truth which has to be lived inwardly, a greater reality into which we have to
grow. Finally, it is in itself a self-existent truth and would be self-evident
if it were not for the sorceries of the ignorance in which we live; the doubts,
the perplexities which prevent us from accepting and following it, arise from
that ignorance, from the sense-bewildered, opinion-perplexed heart and mind,
living as they do in a lower and phenomenal truth and therefore questioning the
higher realities, ajñānasambhūutam
hrtstham samśayam. They have to be cut away by the sword of
knowledge, says the Gita, by the knowledge that realises, by resorting
constantly to Yoga, that is, by living out the union with the Supreme whose
truth being known all is known, yasmin
vijñāte sarvam vijñātam.
The higher
knowledge we then get is that which is to the knower of Brahman his constant
vision of things when he lives uninterruptedly in the Brahman, brahmavid brahmani sthitah. That is not a vision or knowledge
or consciousness of Brahman to the exclusion of all else, but a seeing of all
in Brahman and as the Self. For, it is said, the knowledge by which we rise
beyond all relapse back into the bewilderment of our mental nature, is “that by
which thou shalt see all existences without exception in the Self, then in Me.”
Elsewhere the Gita puts it more largely, “Equal-visioned everywhere, he sees
the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self. He who sees Me
everywhere and all and each in Me, is never lost to Me nor I to him. He who has
reached oneness and loves Me in all beings, that Yogin, howsoever he lives and
acts, is living and acting in
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Me. O Arjuna, he who sees all
equally everywhere as himself, whether it be happiness or suffering, I hold him
to be the supreme Yogin.” That is the old Vedantic knowledge of the Upanishads
which the Gita holds up constantly before us; but it is its superiority to
other later formulations of it that it turns persistently this knowledge into a
great practical philosophy of divine living. Always it insists on the relation
between this knowledge of oneness and Karmayoga, and therefore on the knowledge
of oneness as the basis of a liberated action in the world. Whenever it speaks
of knowledge, it turns at once to speak of equality which is its result;
whenever it speaks of equality, it turns to speak too of the knowledge which is
its basis. The equality it enjoins does not begin and end in a static condition
of the soul useful only for self-liberation; it is always a basis of works. The
peace of the Brahman in the liberated soul is the foundation; the large, free,
equal, world-wide action of the Lord in the liberated nature radiates the power
which proceeds from that peace; these two made one synthesise divine works and
God-knowledge.
We see at once
what a profound extension we get here for the ideas which otherwise the Gita
has in common with other systems of philosophic, ethical or religious living.
Endurance, philosophic indifference, resignation are, we have said, the
foundation of three kinds of equality; but the Gita's truth of knowledge not
only gathers them all up together, but gives them an infinitely profound, a
magnificently ample significance. The Stoic knowledge is that of the soul's
power of self-mastery by fortitude, an equality attained by a struggle with
one's nature, maintained by a constant vigilance and control against its
natural rebellions: it gives a noble peace, an austere happiness, but not the
supreme joy of the liberated self living not by a rule, but in the pure, easy,
spontaneous perfection of its divine being, so that “however it may act and
live, it acts and lives in the Divine,” because here perfection is not only
attained but possessed in its own right and has no longer to be maintained by
effort, for it has become the very nature of the soul's being. The Gita accepts
the endurance and fortitude of our struggle with the lower nature as a
preliminary movement; but if a certain mastery comes by our individual
strength, the freedom of mastery only
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comes by our union with God, by a
merging or dwelling of the personality in the one divine Person and the loss of
the personal will in the divine Will. There is a divine Master of Nature and
her works, above her though inhabiting her, who is our highest being and our
universal self; to be one with him is to make ourselves divine. By union with
God we enter into a supreme freedom and a supreme mastery. The ideal of the
Stoic, the sage who is king because by self-rule he becomes master also of
outward conditions, resembles superficially the Vedantic idea of the self-ruler
and all-ruler, svarāt samrāt;
but it is on a lower plane. The Stoic kingship is maintained by a force put
upon self and environment; the entirely liberated kingship of the Yogin exists
naturally by the eternal royalty of the divine nature, a union with its
unfettered universality, a finally unforced dwelling in its superiority to the
instrumental nature through which it acts. His mastery over things is because
he has become one soul with all things. To take an image from Roman
institutions, the Stoic freedom is that of the libertus, the freedman, who is still really a dependent on the
power that once held him enslaved; his is a freedom allowed by Nature because
he has merited it. The freedom of the Gita is that of the freeman, the true
freedom of the birth into the higher nature, self-existent in its divinity.
Whatever he does and however he lives, the free soul lives in the Divine; he is
the privileged child of the mansion, bālavat,
who cannot err or fall because all he is and does is full of the Perfect, the All-blissful,
the All-loving, the All-beautiful. The kingdom which he enjoys, rājyam samrddham, is a sweet and happy dominion of which it may be
said, in the pregnant phrase of the Greek thinker,
“The kingdom is
of the child.” The knowledge of the philosopher is that of the true nature of
mundane existence, the transience of outward things, the vanity of the world's
differences and distinctions, the superiority of the inner calm, peace, light,
self-dependence. It is an equality of philosophic indifference; it brings a
high calm, but not the greater spiritual joy; it is an isolated freedom, a
wisdom like that of the Lucretian sage high in his superiority upon the
cliff-top whence he looks down on men tossed still upon the tempestuous waters
from which he has escaped, – in the end something
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after all aloof and ineffective.
The Gita admits the philosophic motive of indifference as a preliminary
movement; but the indifference to which it finally arrives, if indeed that inadequate
word can be at all applied, has nothing in it of the philosophic aloofness. It
is indeed a position as of one seated above, udāsīnavat, but as the Divine is seated above, having no
need at all in the world, yet he does works always and is present everywhere
supporting, helping, guiding the labour of creatures. This equality is founded
upon oneness with all beings. It brings in what is wanting to the philosophic
equality; for its soul is the soul of peace, but also it is the soul of love. It
sees all beings without exception in the Divine, it is one self with the Self
of all existences and therefore it is in supreme sympathy with all of them.
Without exception, aśesena,
not only with all that is good and fair and pleases; nothing and no one,
however vile, fallen, criminal, repellent in appearance, can be excluded from
this universal, this whole-souled sympathy and spiritual oneness. Here there is
no room, not merely for hatred or anger or uncharitableness, but for aloofness,
disdain or any petty pride of superiority. A divine compassion for the
ignorance of the struggling mind, a divine will to pour forth on it all light
and power and happiness there will be, indeed, for the apparent man; but for
the divine Soul within him there will be more, there will be adoration and
love. For from all, from the thief and the harlot and the outcaste as from the
saint and the sage, the Beloved looks forth and cries to us, “This is I.” “He
who loves Me in all beings,” – what greater word of power for the utmost
intensities and profundities of divine and universal love, has been uttered by
any philosophy or any religion?
Resignation is
the basis of a kind of religious equality, submission to the divine will, a
patient bearing of the cross, a submissive forbearance. In the Gita this
element takes the more ample form of an entire surrender of the whole being to
God. It is not merely a passive submission, but an active self-giving; not only
a seeing and an accepting of the divine Will in all things, but a giving up of
one's own will to be the instrument of the Master of works, and this not with
the lesser idea of being a servant of God, but, eventually at least, of such a
complete renunciation
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both of the consciousness and the
works to him that our being becomes one with his being and the impersonalised
nature only an instrument and nothing else. All result good or bad, pleasing or
unpleasing, fortunate or unfortunate, is accepted as belonging to the Master of
our actions, so that finally not only are grief and suffering borne, but they
are banished: a perfect equality of the emotional mind is established. There is
no assumption of personal will in the instrument; it is seen that all is
already worked out in the omniscient prescience and omnipotent effective power
of the universal Divine and that the egoism of men cannot alter the workings of
that Will. Therefore, the final attitude is that enjoined on Arjuna in a later
chapter, “All has been already done by Me in my divine will and foresight;
become only the occasion, O Arjuna,” nimittamātram
bhava savyasācin. This attitude must lead finally to an absolute union
of the personal with the Divine Will and, with the growth of knowledge, bring
about a faultless response of the instrument to the divine Power and Knowledge.
A perfect, an absolute equality of self-surrender, the mentality a passive
channel of the divine Light and Power, the active being a mightily effective
instrument for its work in the world, will be the poise of this supreme union
of the Transcendent, the universal and the individual.
Equality too
there will be with regard to the action of others upon us. Nothing that they
can do will alter the inner oneness, love, sympathy which arises from the
perception of the one Self in all, the Divine in all beings. But a resigned forbearance
and submission to them and their deeds, a passive non-resistance, will be no
necessary part of the action; it cannot be, since a constant instrumental
obedience to the divine and universal Will must mean in the shock of opposite forces
that fill the world a conflict with personal wills which seek rather their own
egoistic satisfaction. Therefore Arjuna is bidden to resist, to fight, to conquer;
but, to fight without hatred or personal desire or personal enmity or
antagonism, since to the liberated soul these feelings are impossible. To act
for the lokasamgraha, impersonally,
for the keeping and leading of the peoples on the path to the divine goal, is a
rule which rises necessarily from the oneness of the soul with the Divine, the
universal Being, since
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that is the whole sense and drift
of the universal action. Nor does it conflict with our oneness with all beings,
even those who present themselves here as opponents and enemies. For the divine
goal is their goal also, since it is the secret aim of all, even of those whose
outward minds, misled by ignorance and egoism, would wander from the path and
resist the impulsion. Resistance and defeat are the best outward service that
can be done to them. By this perception the Gita avoids the limiting conclusion
which might have been drawn from a doctrine of equality impracticably
overriding all relations and of a weakening love without knowledge, while it
keeps the one thing essential unimpaired. For the soul oneness with all, for
the heart calm universal love, sympathy, compassion, but for the hands freedom
to work out impersonally the good, not of this or that person only without
regard to or to the detriment of the divine plan, but the purpose of the
creation, the progressing welfare and salvation of men, the total good of all
existences.
Oneness with
God, oneness with all beings, the realisation of the eternal divine unity
everywhere and the drawing onwards of men towards that oneness are the law of
life which arises from the teachings of the Gita. There can be none greater,
wider, more profound. Liberated oneself, to live in this oneness, to help
mankind on the path that leads towards it and meanwhile to do all works for God
and help man also to do with joy and acceptance all the works to which he is
called, krtsnakarmakrt,
sarvakarmāni josayan, no greater or more liberal rule
of divine works can be given. This freedom and this oneness are the secret goal
of our human nature and the ultimate will in the existence of the race. It is
that to which it must turn for the happiness all mankind is now vainly seeking,
when once men lift their eyes and their hearts to see the Divine in them and
around, in all and everywhere, sarvesu,
sarvatra, and learn that it is in him they live, while this lower nature of
division is only a prison-wall which they must break down or at best an
infant-school which they must outgrow, so that they may become adult in nature
and free in spirit. To be made one self with God above and God in man and God
in the world is the sense of liberation and the secret of perfection.
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