Essays on the Gita

IIIThe Supreme Divine 1ALREADY what has been said in the seventh chapter providesus with the starting-point of our new and fullerposition and fixes it with sufficient precision. Substantiallyit comes to this that we are to move inwardly towards agreater consciousness and a supreme existence, not by a totalexclusion of our cosmic nature, but by a higher, a spiritualfulfilment of all that we now essentially are. Only there is tobe a change from our mortal imperfection to a divine perfectionof being. The first idea on which this possibility is founded, is theconception of the individual soul in man as in its eternal essenceand its original power a ray of the supreme Soul and Godhead,here a veiled manifestation of him, a being of his being, a consciousnessof his consciousness, a nature of his nature, but in theobscurity of this mental and physical existence self-forgetful ofits source, its reality, its true character. The second idea is thatof the double nature of the Soul in manifestation, — the originalnature in which it is one with its own true spiritual being, andthe derived in which it is subject to the confusions of egoism andignorance. The latter has to be cast away and the spiritual hasto be inwardly recovered, fulfilled, made dynamic and active.Through an inner self-fulfilment, the opening of a new status,our birth into a new power, we return to the nature of the Spiritand re-become a portion of the Godhead from whom we havedescended into this mortal figure of being.There is here at once a departure from the general contemporarymind of Indian thought, a less negating attitude, a greateraffirmation. In place of its obsessing idea of a self-annulment ofNature we get the glimpse of an ampler solution, the principleof a self-fulfilment in divine Nature. There is, even, at least1 Gita, VII. 29-30, VIII.