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looking inward and seeing an ‘all transcending, truly supernatural principle from which the
forces, phenomena, and divine directors of the natural world proceeded’ (Zimmer, 1969, 357).
Attention was turned from the gods, but their existence was not threatened as it was in the
Greek world. Instead, the focus was on the unseizable, indestructible, and unbound source of
cosmic energy itself, from which streamed gods, demons, men, and all of creation.
The Upanishads provided the metaphor of the chariot to explain the reality of man’s
existence. Man’s self was pictured as the rider of a chariot, his body was the chariot, his
intellect was the charioteer, and his mind was the reins. His sense organs were the horses, and
the objects of his senses were the roads. The individual, made up of self, body, organs and
mind, is what one recognises as the ‘experiencer’ of the universe. The intellect, which Zimmer
describes as ‘intuitive discernment and awareness’ (Zimmer, 1969, 363), manages the organs
and sense objects, just as a good charioteer does his horses and the road, while the rider, the
individual man, makes his way through life gaining experience and self-fulfilment.
The intellect, then, is the source of the individual’s power. In the Bhagavad Gita, this
intellect is personified by the charioteer Krishna, and the individual rider is Arjuna. After
altering the quality of Arjuna’s senses, Krishna reveals his true self as ‘irradiated by a light’
which is both immanental—flowing out of the ‘inner man’ within the individual—and
transcendental (Chaitanya, 20). This intellect which binds the self to the cosmic fountainhead
is the elemental, universal energy, and is therefore certainly that force which Billy Kwan says
de Chardin called the ‘Noosphere’. Indeed, Purushottama Bilimoria mentions the
contemporary role of the Bhagavad Gita in leading ‘human beings to the next stage of
evolution of their consciousness, by revealing to them a deeper wisdom and a method of
achieving their final goal’. He discusses the theory of ‘spiritual evolution’, particularly
analysing the Bhagavad Gita’s ‘relation to the work of the Catholic scientific thinker, Teilhard
de Chardin’ (Bilimoria, 86).
It is in this relationship which Billy Kwan can be seen, and sees himself, in the role of
the charioteer Krishna and Hamilton the rider. Recalling Krishna’s enhancement of Arjuna’s
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