We do not belong to the past dawns but to the noons of the future

We of the coming day stand at the head of a new age of development which must lead to such a new and larger synthesis. We are not called upon to be orthodox Vedantins of any of the three schools or Tantrics or to adhere to one of the theistic religions of the past or to entrench ourselves within the four corners of the teaching of the Gita. That would be to limit ourselves and to attempt to create our spiritual life out of the being, knowledge and nature of others, of the men of the past, instead of building it out of our own being and potentialities. We do not belong to the past dawns, but to the noons of the future. A mass of new material is flowing into us; we have not only to assimilate the influences of the great theistic religions of India and of the world and a recovered sense of the meaning of Buddhism, but to take full account of the potent though limited revelations of modern knowledge and seeking; and, beyond that, the remote and dateless past which seemed to be dead is returning upon us with an effulgence of many luminous secrets long lost to the consciousness of mankind but now breaking out again from behind the veil. All this points to a new, a very rich, a very vast synthesis; a fresh and widely embracing harmonisation of our gains is both an intellectual and a spiritual necessity of the future. But just as the past syntheses have taken those which preceded them for their starting­point, so also must that of the future, to be on firm ground, proceed from what the great bodies of realised spiritual thought and experience in the past have given. Among them the Gita takes a most important place.



Our object, then, in studying the Gita will not be a scholastic or academic scrutiny of its thought, nor to place its philosophy in the history of metaphysical speculation, nor shall we deal with it in the manner of the analytical dialectician. We approach it for help and light and our aim must be to distinguish its essential and living message, that in it on which humanity has to seize for its perfection and its highest spiritual welfare.

-- Sri Aurobindo in Essays on The Gita

Krishna

At last I find a meaning of soul's birth
Into this universe terrible and sweet,
I who have felt the hungry heart of earth
Aspiring beyond heaven to Krishna's feet.

I have seen the beauty of immortal eyes,
And heard the passion of the Lover's flute,
And known a deathless ecstasy's surprise
And sorrow in my heart for ever mute.

Nearer and nearer now the music draws,
Life shudders with a strange felicity;
All Nature is a wide enamoured pause
Hoping her lord to touch, to clasp, to be.

For this one moment lived the ages past;
The world now throbs fulfilled in me at last.

(“Krishna”, Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems , Volume 2, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1970, published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram)

Sri Aurobindo's thoughts and aphorisms on Krishna

I am not a Bhakta, I am not a Jnani, I am not a worker for the Lord. What am I then? A tool in the hands of my Master, a flute blown upon by the divine Herd-Boy, a leaf driven by the breath of the Lord.

Devotion is not utterly fulfilled till it becomes action and knowledge. If thou pursuest after God and canst overtake Him, let Him not go till thou hast His reality. If thou hast hold of His reality, insist on having also His totality. The first will give thee divine knowledge, the second will give thee divine works and a free and perfect joy in the universe.

Beyond Personality the Mayavadin sees indefinable Existence; I followed him there and found my Krishna beyond in indefinable Personality.

Even the atheist ought now to be able to see that creation marches towards some infinite and mighty purpose which evolution in its very nature supposes. But infinite purpose and fulfilment presupposes an infinite wisdom that prepares, guides, shapes, protects and justifies. Revere then that Wisdom and worship it with thoughts in thy soul if not with incense in a temple, and even though thou deny it the heart of infinite Love and the mind of infinite self- effulgence. Then though thou know it not, it is still Krishna whom thou reverest and worshippest.

The divine Friend of all creatures conceals His friendliness in the mask of an enemy till He has made us ready for the highest heavens; then, as in Kurukshetra, the terrible form of the Master of strife, suffering and destruction is withdrawn and the sweet face, the tenderness, the oft­clasped body of Krishna shine out on the shaken soul and purified eyes of his eternal comrade and playmate.

(CWM Volume 10, Centenary Edition Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1976, Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry- 605002) .

Surrender

O Thou of whom I am the instrument,
O secret Spirit and Nature housed in me,
Let all my mortal being now be blent
In Thy still glory of divinity.

I have given my mind to be dug Thy channel mind
I have offered up my will to Thy will;
Let nothing of myself be left behind
In our union mystic and unutterable.

My heart shall throb with the world-beats of Thy love,
My body become Thy engine for earth-use;
In my nerves and veins Thy rapture's streams shall move;
My thoughts shall be Hounds of Light for thy power to loose.

Keep only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee.

(“Surrender”, Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Volume 2, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1970, published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram)

Question of the month

Q: What does this mean “the colloquy of Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity“?

A: The Mother: Sri Aurobindo considers the message of the Gita to be the basis of the great spiritual movement which has led and will lead humanity more and more to its liberation, that is to say, to its escape from falsehood and ignorance, towards the truth. .

From the time of its first appearance, the Gita has had an immense spiritual action: but with the new interpretation that Sri Aurobindo has given to it, its influence has increased considerably and has become decisive.


Q: Some say Krishna never lived, he is a myth. They mean on earth; for if Brindavan existed nowhere, the Bhagavat could not be written.

Does Brindavan exist anywhere else than on earth?

A: The Mother: The whole earth and everything it contains is a kind of concentration, a condensation of something which exists in other worlds invisible to the material eye. Each thing manifested here has its principle, idea or essence somewhere in the subtler regions. This is an indispensable condition for the manifestation. And the importance of the manifestation will always depend on the origin of the thing manifested.

In the world of the gods there is an ideal and harmonious Brindavan of which the earthly Brindavan is but a deformation and a caricature.

Those who are developed inwardly, either in their senses or in their minds, perceive these realities which are invisible (to the ordinary man) and receive their inspiration from them.

So the writer or writers of the Bhagavat were certainly in contact with a whole inner world that is well and truly real and existent, where they saw and experienced everything they have described or revealed.

Whether Krishna existed or not in human form, living on earth, is only of very secondary importance (except perhaps from a purely historical point of view), for Krishna is a real, living and active being; for his influence has been one of the great factors in the progress and transformation of the earth.
- The Mother (8th June, 1960)

(CWM Volume 10, Centenary Edition Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1976, Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry- 605002) .

Savitri

The Immanent shall be the witness God
Watching on his many-petalled lotus-throne,
His actionless being and his silent might
Ruling earth-nature by eternity’s law,
A thinker waking the Inconscient’s world,
An immobile center of many infinitudes
In his thousand-pillared temple by Time’s sea.
Then shall the embodied being live as one
Who is a thought, a will of the Divine,
A mask or robe of his divinity,
An instrument and partner of his Force,
A point or line drawn in the infinite,
A manifest of the Imperishable.
The supermind shall be his nature’s fount,
The Eternal’s truth shall mould his thoughts and acts,
The Eternal’s truth shall be his light and guide.


(Savitri, Book 11, Canto 1)

Editorial

Few scriptural works qualify as both smrti as well as sruti or ‘revealed text’. The Bhagavad Gita is held as such. It is revered as the rare ‘scripture of liberation’. What this liberation is, who seeks it, who is the giver of liberation, who, the enjoyer, through what methods is this liberation procured and what all the multifaceted results of such a liberation, is the subject of this colloquy between the main players of the Gita, Sri Krishna and Arjuna at Kurukshetra, the predestined battleground. Sri Krishna, the Supreme Teacher instructs his friend-turned-disciple, Arjuna, the embodied soul lost in the myriad works of maya, in the ways of liberation for right action along the path of Dharma. And what Dharma is too gets a good airing in this precious gem of a text.
Many commentaries there are on the Gita. The interpretations though, are variously coloured and treated, never steer away from the one suggestion that the embodied soul, that most of us can conclude we are, has another life in freedom and joy, an unlimited capacity in taking upon oneself all tasks that are divinely decreed, that the swabhava, or true essence within, knows to be its natural way towards fulfillment of its existence, its potentialities, its manifestation.
Sri Aurobindo, in his commentaries that take the form of Essays on The Gita, teases out the integral approach inherent in the Gita in dealing with human life, a life not very unlike one lived upon a battlefield, whether it is in one’s home, work place or within the heart of oneself or all three combined and more.
The Gita must be about the only scripture, one can, with a measure of confidence say, that addresses a man of action, as it were, positing him right in the midst of a battle-field, between two armies on the verge of war. The setting is of immense import, physically, psychologically, mentally, vitally. The sense of an immense conflict on every side sometimes floods in upon us too, at moments, intense moments of crises. In such a setting, the gallant warrior breaks down, drops his bow and falls upon his knees, refusing to fight the good fight, his excuses those that we too are likely to utter during moments of crises, and which crumple as feeble in the presence of The Immanent Teacher. This is a scripture that aims at transformation from within. We can state this somewhat valid assumption then, that where there is man, there is action and where there is action, there is strife and where there is strife, a guidance is called upon and wherever this cry is, a Gita appears, an Upadesh, so to speak, from the mouth of the realized to the seeking and calling spirit, bound, crying to be set free, liberated.

Sri Aurobindo, in his divine pragmatism, posits the Gita for us in its right place in our lives as he begins his Essays on The Gita, which were first published in the Arya: “..what we can do with profit is to seek in the Gita for the actual living truths it contains, apart from their metaphysical form, to extract from it what can help us or the world at large and to put it in the most natural and vital form and expression we can find that will be suitable to the mentality and helpful to the spiritual needs of our present-day humanity.”

Taking a daring step onto the battlefield, let’s hear out the Song of the Lord sounding deep in the din…