Essays on the Gita

Towards the Supreme Secret 537devotion to a love that is calm and deep and luminous withwidest knowledge, to a supreme delight in God and an illimitableadoration, the unperturbed ecstasy, the spiritual Ananda. Whenthe soul has lost its separative personality, when it has becomethe Brahman, it is then that it can live in the true Person andcan attain to the supreme revealing bhakti for the Purushottamaand can come to know him utterly by the power of its profoundbhakti, its heart’s knowledge, bhaktyā mām abhijānāti. Thatisthe integral knowledge, when the heart’s fathomless vision completesthe mind’s absolute experience, — samagraṁmāṁjñātvā.“He comes to know Me,” says the Gita, “who and how much Iam and in all the reality and principles of my being, yāvān yaścāsmi tattvataḥ.” This integral knowledge is the knowledge ofthe Divine present in the individual; it is the entire experience ofthe Lord secret in the heart of man, revealed now as the supremeSelf of his existence, the Sun of all his illumined consciousness,the Master and Power of all his works, the divine Fountain of allhis soul’s love and delight, the Lover and Beloved of his worshipand adoration. It is the knowledge too of the Divine extendedin the universe, of the Eternal from whom all proceeds andin whom all lives and has its being, of the Self and Spirit of thecosmos, of Vasudeva who has become all this that is, of the Lordof cosmic existence who reigns over the works of Nature. It is theknowledge of the divine Purusha luminous in his transcendenteternity, the form of whose being escapes from the thought of themind but not from its silence; it is the entire living experience ofhim as absolute Self, supreme Brahman, supreme Soul, supremeGodhead: for that seemingly incommunicable Absolute is at thesame time and even in that highest status the originating Spiritof the cosmic action and Lord of all these existences. The soulof the liberated man thus enters by a reconciling knowledge,penetrates by a perfect simultaneous delight of the transcendentDivine, of the Divine in the individual and of the Divine in theuniverse into the Purushottama, māṁ viśate tadanantaram. Hebecomes one with him in his self-knowledge and self-experience,one with him in his being and consciousness and will and worldknowledgeand world-impulse, one with him in the universe and