Essays on the Gita

The Supreme Secret 543it is a truth of our self and spirit. And yet or rather therefore,because it is the truth of our self and spirit, the truth of itsoneness with that Spirit from which all comes and by it and asits derivations and suggestions all exists and travails, it is not anegation but a fulfilment of all that mind and life point to andbear in them as their secret and unaccomplished significance.Thus it is not by a nirvana, an exclusion and negating extinctionof all that we are here, but by a nirvana, an exclusion and negatingextinction of ignorance and ego and a consequent ineffablefulfilment of our knowledge and will and heart’s aspiration, anuplifted and limitless living of them in the Divine, in the Eternal,nivasiṣyasi mayyeva, a transfigurement and transference of allour consciousness to a greater inner status that there comes thissupreme perfection and release in the spirit.The crux of the spiritual problem, the character of this transitionof which it is so difficult for the normal mind of manto get a true apprehension, turns altogether upon the capitaldistinction between the ignorant life of the ego in the lowernature and the large and luminous existence of the liberatedJiva in his own true spiritual nature. The renunciation of thefirst must be complete, the transition to the second absolute.This is the distinction on which the Gita dwells here with allpossible emphasis. On the one side is this poor, trepidant, braggartegoistic condition of consciousness, ahaṅkṛta bhāva, thecrippling narrowness of this little helpless separative personalityaccording to whose view-point we ordinarily think and act, feeland respond to the touches of existence. On the other are the vastspiritual reaches of immortal fullness, bliss and knowledge intowhich we are admitted through union with the divine Being, ofwhom we are then a manifestation and expression in the eternallight and no longer a disguise in the darkness of the ego-nature.It is the completeness of this union which is indicated by theGita’s satataṁ mac-cittaḥ. The life of the ego is founded on aconstruction of the apparent mental, vital and physical truthof existence, on a nexus of pragmatic relations between theindividual soul and Nature, on an intellectual, emotional andsensational interpretation of things used by the little limited I in