The Divine Teacher : Sri Aurobondo.

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Saturday, 13 May, 2023. 05:30.

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THE PECULIARITY of the Gita among the great religious

books of the world is that it does not stand apart as a

work by itself, the fruit of the spiritual life of a creative

personality like Christ, Mahomed or Buddha or of an epoch of

pure spiritual searching like the Veda and Upanishads, but is

given as an episode in an epic history of nations and their wars

and men and their deeds and arises out of a critical moment in the

soul of one of its leading personages face to face with the crowning 

action of his life, a work terrible, violent and sanguinary, at

the point when he must either recoil from it altogether or carry it

through to its inexorable completion. It matters little whether or

no, as modern criticism supposes, the Gita is a later composition

inserted into the mass of the Mahabharata by its author in order

to invest its teaching with the authority and popularity of the

great national epic. There seem to me to be strong grounds

against this supposition for which, besides, the evidence, 

extrinsic or internal, is in the last degree scanty and insufficient. 

But even if it be sound, there remains the fact that the author has

not only taken pains to interweave his work inextricably into

the vast web of the larger poem, but is careful again and again to

remind us of the situation from which the teaching has arisen;

he returns to it prominently, not only at the end, but in the

middle of his profoundest philosophical disquisitions. We must

accept the insistence of the author and give its full importance

to this recurrent preoccupation of the Teacher and the disciple.

The teaching of the Gita must therefore be regarded not merely

in the light of a general spiritual philosophy or ethical doctrine,

but as bearing upon a practical crisis in the application of ethics

and spirituality to human life. For what that crisis stands, what

is the significance of the battle of Kurukshetra and its effect on

Arjuna’s inner being we have first to determine if we would

grasp the central drift of the ideas of the Gita.

Very obviously a great body of the profoundest teaching

cannot be built round an ordinary occurrence which has no gulfs

of deep suggestion and hazardous difficulty behind its superficial

and outward aspects and can be governed well enough by the

ordinary everyday standards of thought and action. There are

indeed three things in the Gita which are spiritually significant,

almost symbolic, typical of the profoundest relations and

 problems of the spiritual life and of human existence at its roots;

they are the divine personality of the Teacher, his characteristic

relations with his disciple and the occasion of his teaching. The

teacher is God himself descended into humanity; the disciple is

the first, as we might say in modern language, the representative

man of his age, closest friend and chosen instrument of the

Avatar, his protagonist in an immense work and struggle the

secret purpose of which is unknown to the actors in it, known

only to the incarnate Godhead who guides it all from behind the

veil of his unfathomable mind of knowledge; the occasion is the

violent crisis of that work and struggle at the moment when the

anguish and moral difficulty and blind violence of its apparent

movements forces itself with the shock of a visible revelation on

the mind of its representative man and raises the whole question

of the meaning of God in the world and the goal and drift and

sense of human life and conduct.

India has from ancient times held strongly a belief in the

reality of the Avatara, the descent into form, the revelation of

the Godhead in humanity. In the West this belief has never 

really stamped itself upon the mind because it has been presented

through exoteric Christianity as a theological dogma without

any roots in the reason and general consciousness and attitude

towards life. But in India it has grown up and persisted as a

logical outcome of the Vedantic view of life and taken firm root

in the consciousness of the race. All existence is a manifestation

of God because He is the only existence and nothing can be

except as either a real figuring or else a figment of that one

reality. Therefore every conscious being is in part or in 

somename and form. But it is a veiled manifestation and there is

a gradation between the supreme being1 of the Divine and the

consciousness shrouded partly or wholly by ignorance of self

in the finite. The conscious embodied soul2 is the spark of the

divine Fire and that soul in man opens out to self-knowledge as

it develops out of ignorance of self into self-being. The Divine

also, pouring itself into the forms of the cosmic existence, is

revealed ordinarily in an efflorescence of its powers, in energies

and magnitudes of its knowledge, love, joy, developed force of

being,3 in degrees and faces of its divinity. But when the divine

Consciousness and Power, taking upon itself the human form

and the human mode of action, possesses it not only by powers

and magnitudes, by degrees and outward faces of itself but out

of its eternal self-knowledge, when the Unborn knows itself and

acts in the frame of the mental being and the appearance of

birth, that is the height of the conditioned manifestation; it is

the full and conscious descent of the Godhead, it is the Avatara.

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