Essays on the Gita

312 <strong>Essays</strong> on the Gitaname of universe, all this immense sum of motion to which wecan fix no limits and vainly seek in its forms and movementsfor any stable reality, any status, level and point of cosmicleverage, has been spun out, shaped, extended by this highestInfinite, founded upon this ineffable supracosmic Mystery. Itis founded upon a self-formulation which is itself unmanifestand unthinkable. All this mass of becomings always changingand in motion, all these creatures, existences, things, breathingand living forms cannot contain him either in their sum or intheir separate existence. He is not in them; it is not in themor by them that he lives, moves or has his being, — God isnot the Becoming. It is they that are in him, it is they thatlive and move in him and draw their truth from him; they arehis becomings, he is their being. 1 In the unthinkable timelessand spaceless infinity of his existence he has extended this minorphenomenon of a boundless universe in an endless spaceand time.And even to say of him that all exists in him is not the wholetruth of the matter, not the entirely real relation: for it is tospeak of him with the idea of space, and the Divine is spacelessand timeless. Space and time, immanence and pervasion andexceeding are all of them terms and images of his consciousness.There is a Yoga of divine Power, me yoga aiśvaraḥ, bywhichthe Supreme creates phenomena of himself in a spiritual, not amaterial, self-formulation of his own extended infinity, an extensionof which the material is only an image. He sees himselfas one with that, is identified with that and all it harbours. Inthat infinite self-seeing, which is not his whole seeing, — thepantheist’s identity of God and universe is a still more limitedview, — he is at once one with all that is and yet exceeds it; buthe is other also than this self or extended infinity of spiritualbeing which contains and exceeds the universe. All exists herein his world-conscious infinite, but that again is upheld as a selfconceptionby the supracosmic reality of the Godhead whichexceeds all our terms of world and being and consciousness.1 matsthāni sarvabhūtāni na cāhaṁ teṣvavasthitaḥ.