Essays on the Gita

Deva and Asura 467of widest self-existence, spontaneous self-knowledge, intimateuniversal identity, deepest self-interchange, not of acquisition,assimilation, adjustment and laboured equivalence. That light isfull of a luminous spiritual will and there is no gulf or disparatenessbetween its knowledge and its action. That delight is notour paler mental happiness, sukham, but a profound concentratedintense self-existent bliss extended to all that our beingdoes, envisages, creates, a fixed divine rapture, Ananda. Theliberated soul participates more and more profoundly in thislight and bliss and grows the more perfectly into it, the moreintegrally it unites itself with the Divine. And while among thegunas of the lower Nature there is a necessary disequilibrium,a shifting inconstancy of measures and a perpetual struggle fordomination, the greater light and bliss, calm, will of kinesis ofthe Spirit do not exclude each other, are not at war, are not evenmerely in equilibrium, but each an aspect of the two others andin their fullness all are inseparable and one. Our mind when itapproaches the Divine may seem to enter into one to the exclusionof another, may appear for instance to achieve calm to theexclusion of kinesis of action, but that is because we approachhim first through the selecting spirit in the mind. Afterwardswhen we are able to rise above even the spiritual mind, we cansee that each divine power contains all the rest and can get ridof this initial error. 3We see then that action is possible without the subjectionof the soul to the normal degraded functioning of the modesof Nature. That functioning depends on the mental, vital andphysical limitation into which we are cast; it is a deformation,an incapacity, a wrong or depressed value imposed on us bythe mind and life in matter. When we grow into the spirit, this3 The account given here of the supreme spiritual and supramental forms of highestNature action corresponding to the gunas is not derived from the Gita, but introducedfrom spiritual experience. The Gita does not describe in any detail the action of thehighest Nature, rahasyam uttamam; it leaves that for the seeker to discover by his ownspiritual experience. It only points out the nature of the high sattwic temperament andaction through which this supreme mystery has to be reached and insists at the sametime on the overpassing of Sattwa and transcendence of the three gunas.