Essays on the Gita

The Message of the Gita 575And our will and action too are no longer that of this boundedpersonality and its ego, but a divine and spiritual will and action,the will and power of the Universal, the Supreme, the All-Selfand Spirit acting freely through the human figure.“This is the great change and transfiguration,” runs the messageof the Godhead in man, the Avatar, the divine Teacher, “towhich I call the elect, and the elect are all who can turn their willaway from the ignorance of the natural instruments to the soul’sdeepest experience, its knowledge of the inner self and spirit, itscontact with the Godhead, its power to enter into the Divine.The elect are all who can accept this faith and this greater law.It is difficult indeed to accept for the human intellect attachedalways to its own cloud-forms and half lights of ignorance andto the yet obscurer habits of man’s mental, nervous and physicalparts; but once received it is a great and sure and saving way,because it is identical with the true truth of man’s being and itis the authentic movement of his inmost and supreme nature.“But the change is a very great one, an enormous transformation,and it cannot be done without an entire turning andconversion of your whole being and nature. There will be neededa complete consecration of your self and your nature and yourlife to the Highest and to nothing else but the Highest; for allmust be held only for the sake of the Highest, nothing acceptedexcept as it is in God and a form of God and for the sake of theDivine. There will be needed an admission of new truth, an entireturn and giving of your mind to a new knowledge of self andothers and world and God and soul and Nature, a knowledgeof oneness, a knowledge of universal Divinity, which will be atfirst an acceptance by the understanding but must become in theend a vision, a consciousness, a permanent state of the soul andthe frame of its movements.“There will be needed a will that shall make this new knowledge,vision, consciousness a motive of action and the sole motive.And it must be the motive not of an action grudging, limited,confined to a few necessary operations of Nature or to the fewthings that seem helpful to a formal perfection, apposite to a religiousturn or to an individual salvation, but rather all action of