Chapter
XII
The Divine
Work
ONE question remains for the
seeker upon the way of works, when his quest is or seems to have come to its
natural end, – whether any work or what work is left for the soul after
liberation and to what purpose? Equality has been seated in the nature or
governs the whole nature; there has been achieved a radical deliverance from the
ego-idea, from the pervading ego-sense, from all feelings and impulsions of the
ego and its self-will and desires. The entire self-consecration has been made
not only in thought and heart but in all the complexities of the being. A
complete purity or transcendence of the three gunas has been harmoniously
established. The soul has seen the Master of its works and lives in his
presence or is consciously contained in his being or is unified with him or
feels him in the heart or above and obeys his dictates. It has known its true
being and cast away the veil of the Ignorance. What work then remains for the
worker in man and with what motive, to what end, in what spirit will it be
done?
*
*
There is one
answer with which we are very familiar in India; no work at
all remains, for the rest is quiescence. When the soul can live in the eternal
presence of the Supreme or when it is unified with the Absolute, the object of
our existence in the world, if it can be said to have an object, at once
ceases. Man, released from the curse of self-division and the curse of Ignorance,
is released too from that other affliction, the curse of works. All action
would then be a derogation from the supreme state and a return into the
Ignorance. This attitude towards life is supported by an idea founded on the
error of the vital nature to which action is dictated only by one or all of
three inferior motives, necessity, restless instinct and impulse or desire. The
instinct or im-
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pulse quiescent, desire
extinguished, what place is there for works? Some mechanical necessity might
remain but no other, and even that would cease for ever with the fall of the
body. But after all, even so, while life remains, action is unavoidable. Mere
thinking or, in the absence of thought, mere living is itself an act and a
cause of many effects. All existence in the world is work, force, potency, and
has a dynamic effect in the whole by its mere presence, even the inertia of the
clod, even the silence of the immobile Buddha on the verge of Nirvana. There is
the question only of the manner of the action, the instruments that are used or
that act of themselves, and the spirit and knowledge of the worker. For in
reality, no man works, but Nature works through him for the self-expression of
a Power within that proceeds from the Infinite. To know that and live in the
presence and in the being of the Master of Nature, free from desire and the
illusion of personal impulsion, is the one thing needful. That and not the bodily
cessation of action is the true release; for the bondage of works at once
ceases. A man might sit still and motionless for ever and yet be as much bound
to the Ignorance as the animal or the insect. But if he can make this greater consciousness
dynamic within him, then all the work of all the worlds could pass through him
and yet he would remain at rest, absolute in calm and peace, free from all
bondage. Action in the world is given us first as a means for our self-development
and self-fulfilment; but even if we reached a last possible divine
self-completeness, it would still remain as a means for the fulfilment of the
divine intention in the world and of the larger universal self of which each
being is a portion – a portion that has come down with it from the
Transcendence.
In a certain
sense, when his Yoga has reached a certain culmination, works cease for a man;
for he has no further personal necessity of works, no sense of works being done
by him; but there is no need to flee from action or to take refuge in a
blissful inertia. For now he acts as the Divine Existence acts without any
binding necessity and without any compelling ignorance. Even in doing works he
does not work at all; he undertakes no personal initiative. It is the Divine
Shakti that works in him through his nature; his action develops through the
spontaneity of a supreme
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Force by which his
instruments are possessed, of which he is a part, with whose will his will is
identical and his power is her power. The spirit within him contains, supports
and watches this action; it presides over it in knowledge but is not glued or
clamped to the work by attachment or need, is not bound by desire of its fruit,
is not enslaved to any movement or impulse.
It is a
common error to suppose that action is impossible or at least meaningless
without desire. If desire ceases, we are told, action also must cease. But
this, like other too simply comprehensive generalisations, is more attractive
to the cutting and defining mind than true. The major part of the work done in
the universe is accomplished without any interference of desire; it proceeds by
the calm necessity and spontaneous law of Nature. Even man constantly does work
of various kinds by a spontaneous impulse, intuition, instinct or acts in
obedience to a natural necessity and law of forces without either mental
planning or the urge of a conscious vital volition or emotional desire. Often
enough his act is contrary to his intention or his desire; it proceeds out of
him in subjection to a need or compulsion, in submission to an impulse, in
obedience to a force in him that pushes for self-expression or in conscious
pursuance of a higher principle. Desire is an additional lure to which Nature
has given a great part in the life of animated beings in order to produce a
certain kind of rajasic action necessary for her intermediate ends; but it is
not her sole or even her chief engine. It has its great use while it endures:
it helps us to rise out of inertia, it contradicts many tamasic forces which
would otherwise inhibit action. But the seeker who has advanced far on the way
of works has passed beyond this intermediate stage in which desire is a helpful
engine. Its push is no longer indispensable for his action, but is rather a
terrible hindrance and source of stumbling, inefficiency and failure. Others
are obliged to obey a personal choice or motive, but he has to learn to act
with an impersonal or a universal mind or as a part or an instrument of an
infinite Person. A calm indifference, a joyful impartiality or a blissful
response to a divine Force, whatever its dictate, is the condition of his doing
any effective work or undertaking any worth-while action. Not desire, not
attachment must drive him, but a Will that stirs in a divine peace,
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a Knowledge that moves
from the transcendent Light, a glad Impulse that is a force from the supreme
Ananda.
* *
In an
advanced stage of the Yoga it is indifferent to the seeker, in the sense of any
personal preference, what action he shall do or not do; even whether he shall
act or not, is not decided by his personal choice or pleasure. Always he is
moved to do whatever is in consonance with the Truth or whatever the Divine
demands through his nature. A false conclusion is sometimes drawn from this
that the spiritual man, accepting the position in which Fate or God or his past
Karma has placed him, content to work in the field and cadre of the family,
clan, caste, nation, occupation which are his by birth and circumstance, will
not and even perhaps ought not to make any movement to exceed them or to pursue
any great mundane end. Since he has really no work to do, since he has only to
use works, no matter what works, as long as he is in the body in order to
arrive at liberation or, having arrived, only to obey the supreme Will and do
whatever it dictates, the actual field given him is sufficient for the purpose.
Once free, he has only to continue working in the sphere assigned to him by
Fate and circumstances till the great hour arrives when he can at last
disappear into the Infinite. To insist on any particular end or to work for
some great mundane object is to fall into the illusion of works; it is to
entertain the error that terrestrial life has an intelligible intention and
contains objects worthy of pursuit. The great theory of Illusion, which is a
practical denial of the Divine in the world, even when in idea it acknowledges
the Presence, is once more before us. But the Divine is here in the world, – not
only in status but in dynamis, not only as a spiritual self and presence but as
power, force, energy, – and therefore a divine work in the world is possible.
There is no
narrow principle, no field of cabined action that can be imposed on the
Karmayogin as his rule or his province. This much is true that every kind of
works, whether small to man’s imagination or great, petty in scope or wide, can
be equally used in the progress towards liberation or for self-discipline.
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This much is also true
that after liberation a man may dwell in any sphere of life and in any kind of
action and fulfil there his existence in the Divine. According as he is moved
by the Spirit, he may remain in the sphere assigned to him by birth and
circumstances or break that framework and go forth to an untrammelled action
which shall be the fitting body of his greatened consciousness and higher
knowledge. To the outward eyes of men the inner liberation may make no apparent
difference in his outward acts; or, on the contrary, the freedom and infinity
within may translate itself into an outward dynamic working so large and new
that all regards are drawn by this novel force. If such be the intention of the
Supreme within him, the liberated soul may be content with a subtle and limited
action within the old human surroundings which will in no way seek to change
their outward appearance. But it may too be called to a work which will not
only alter the forms and sphere of its own external life but, leaving nothing around
it unchanged or unaffected, create a new world or a new order.
* *
A prevalent
idea would persuade us that the sole aim of liberation is to secure for the
individual soul freedom from physical rebirth in the unstable life of the
universe. If this freedom is once assured, there is no further work for it in
life here or elsewhere or only that which the continued existence of the body
demands or the unfulfilled effects of past lives necessitate. This little,
rapidly exhausted or consumed by the fire of Yoga, will cease with the
departure of the released soul from the body. The aim of escape from rebirth,
now long fixed in the Indian mentality as the highest object of the soul, has replaced
the enjoyment of a heaven beyond fixed in the mentality of the devout by many
religions as their divine lure. Indian religion also upheld that earlier and
lower call when the gross external interpretation of the Vedic hymns was the
dominant creed, and the dualists in later India also have
kept that as part of their supreme spiritual motive. Undoubtedly a release from
the limitations of the mind and body into an eternal peace, rest, silence of
the Spirit, makes
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a higher appeal than the
offer of a heaven of mental joys or eternised physical pleasures, but this too
after all is a lure; its insistence on the mind’s world-weariness, the
life-being’s shrinking from the adventure of birth, strikes a chord of weakness
and cannot be the supreme motive. The desire of personal salvation, however
high its form, is an outcome of ego; it rests on the idea of our own
individuality and its desire for its personal good or welfare, its longing for
a release from suffering or its cry for the extinction of the trouble of
becoming and makes that the supreme aim of our existence. To rise beyond the desire
of personal salvation is necessary for the complete rejection of this basis of
ego. If we seek the Divine, it should be for the sake of the Divine and for
nothing else, because that is the supreme call of our being, the deepest truth
of the spirit. The pursuit of liberation, of the soul’s freedom, of the
realisation of our true and highest self, of union with the Divine, is justified
only because it is the highest law of our nature, because it is the attraction
of that which is lower in us to that which is highest, because it is the Divine
Will in us. That is its sufficient justification and its one truest reason; all
other motives are excrescences, minor or incidental truths or useful lures which
the soul must abandon, the moment their utility has passed and the state of
oneness with the Supreme and with all beings has become our normal
consciousness and the bliss of that state our spiritual atmosphere.
Often, we see
this desire of personal salvation overcome by another attraction which also
belongs to the higher turn of our nature and which indicates the essential
character of the action the liberated soul must pursue. It is that which is
implied in the great legend of the Amitabha Buddha who turned away when his
spirit was on the threshold of Nirvana and took the vow never to cross it while
a single being remained in the sorrow and the Ignorance. It is that which
underlies the sublime verse of the Bhagavata Purana, “I desire not the supreme
state with all its eight siddhis nor the cessation of rebirth; may I assume the
sorrow of all creatures who suffer and enter into them so that they may be made
free from grief.” It is that which inspires a remarkable passage in a letter of
Swami Vivekananda. “I have lost all wish for my salvation,” wrote the great
Vedantin, “may I be born
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again and
again and suffer thousands of miseries so that I may worship the only God that
exists, the only God I believe in, the sum-total of all souls, – and above all,
my God the wicked, my God the miserable, my God the poor of all races, of all
species is the special object of my worship. He who is the high and low, the
saint and the sinner, the god and the worm, Him worship, the visible, the
knowable, the real, the omnipresent; break all other idols. In whom there is
neither past life nor future birth, nor death nor going nor coming, in whom we
always have been and always will be one, Him worship; break all other idols.”
The last two
sentences contain indeed the whole gist of the matter. The true salvation or
the true freedom from the chain of rebirth is not the rejection of terrestrial
life or the individual’s escape by a spiritual self-annihilation, even as the
true renunciation is not the mere physical abandonment of family and society;
it is the inner identification with the Divine in whom there is no limitation
of past life and future birth but instead the eternal existence of the unborn
Soul. He who is free inwardly, even doing actions, does nothing at all, says
the Gita; for it is Nature that works in him under the control of the Lord of
Nature. Equally, even if he assumes a hundred times the body, he is free from
any chain of birth or mechanical wheel of existence since he lives in the
unborn and undying spirit and not in the life of the body. Therefore attachment
to the escape from rebirth is one of the idols which, whoever keeps, the
sadhaka of the integral Yoga must break and cast away from him. For his Yoga is
not limited to the realisation of the Transcendent beyond all world by the
individual soul; it embraces also the realisation of the Universal, “the
sum-total of all souls”, and cannot therefore be confined to the movement of a
personal salvation and escape. Even in his transcendence of cosmic limitations
he is still one with all in God; a divine work remains for him in the universe.
* *
That work
cannot be fixed by any mind-made rule or human standard; for his consciousness
has moved away from human law and limits and passed into the divine liberty,
away from
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government by the
external and transient into the self-rule of the inner and eternal, away from
the binding forms of the finite into the free self-determination of the
Infinite. “Howsoever he lives and acts,” says the Gita, “he lives and acts in
Me.” The rules which the intellect of men lays down cannot apply to the
liberated soul, – by the external criteria and tests which their mental
associations and prejudgments prescribe, such a one cannot be judged; he is
outside the narrow jurisdiction of these fallible tribunals. It is immaterial whether
he wears the garb of the ascetic or lives the full life of the householder;
whether he spends his days in what men call holy works or in the many-sided
activities of the world; whether he devotes himself to the direct leading of
men to the Light like Buddha, Christ or Shankara or governs kingdoms like
Janaka or stands before men like Sri Krishna as a politician or a leader of
armies; what he eats or drinks; what are his habits or his pursuits; whether he
fails or succeeds; whether his work be one of construction or of destruction;
whether he supports or restores an old order or labours to replace it by a new;
whether his associates are those whom men delight to honour or those whom their
sense of superior righteousness outcastes and reprobates; whether his life and
deeds are approved by his contemporaries or he is condemned as a misleaders of
men and a fomenter of religious, moral or social heresies. He is not governed
by the judgments of men or the laws laid down by the ignorant; he obeys an
inner voice and is moved by an unseen Power. His real life is within and this
is its description that he lives, moves and acts in God, in the Divine, in the
Infinite.
But if his
action is governed by no external rule, one rule it will observe that is not
external; it will be dictated by no personal desire or aim, but will be a part
of a conscious and eventually a well-ordered because self-ordered divine
working in the world. The Gita declares that the action of the liberated man
must be directed not by desire, but towards the keeping together of the world,
its government, guidance, impulsion, maintenance in the path appointed to it.
This injunction has been
interpreted in the sense
that the world being an illusion in which most men must be kept, since they are
unfit for liberation, he must so act
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outwardly as to cherish
in them an attachment to their customary works laid down for them by the social
law. If so, it would be a poor and petty rule and every noble heart would
reject it to follow rather the divine vow of Amitabha Buddha, the sublime
prayer of the Bhagavata, the passionate aspiration of Vivekananda. But if we
accept rather the view that the world is a divinely guided movement of Nature
emerging in man towards God and that this is the work in which the Lord of the
Gita declares that he is ever occupied although he himself has nothing ungained
that he has yet to win, then a deep and true sense will appear for this great
injunction. To participate in that divine work, to live for God in the world
will be the rule of the Karmayogin; to live for God in the world and therefore
so to act that the Divine may more and more manifest himself and the world go
forward by whatever way of its obscure pilgrimage and move nearer to the divine
ideal.
How he shall
do this, in what particular way, can be decided by no general rule. It must
develop or define itself from within; the decision lies between God and our
self, the Supreme Self and the individual self that is the instrument of the work;
even before liberation, it is from the inner self, as soon as we become
conscious of it, that there rises the sanction, the spiritually determined
choice. It is altogether from within that must come the knowledge of the work
that has to be done. There is no particular work, no law or form or outwardly
fixed or invariable way of works which can be said to be that of the liberated
being. The phrase used in the Gita to express this work that has to be done has
indeed been interpreted in the sense that we must do our duty without regard to
the fruit. But this is a conception born of European culture which is ethical rather
than spiritual and external rather than inwardly profound in its concepts. No
such general thing as duty exists; we have only duties, often in conflict with
each other, and these are determined by our environment, our social relations,
our external status in life. They are of great value in training the immature
moral nature and setting up a standard which discourages the action of selfish desire.
It has already been said that so long as the seeker has no inner light, he must
govern himself by the best light he has, and duty, a prin-
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ciple, a cause are
among the standards he may temporarily erect and observe. But for all that,
duties are external things, not stuff of the soul and cannot be the ultimate
standard of action in this path. It is the duty of the soldier to fight when
called upon, even to fire upon his own kith and kin; but such a standard or any
akin to it cannot be imposed on the liberated man. On the other hand, to love
or have compassion, to obey the highest truth of our being, to follow the command
of the Divine are not duties; these things are a law of the nature as it rises
towards the Divine, an outflowing of action from a soul-state, a high reality
of the spirit. The action of the liberated doer of works must be even such an outflowing
from the soul; it must come to him or out of him as a natural result of his
spiritual union with the Divine and not be formed by an edifying construction
of the mental thought and will, the practical reason or the social sense. In
the ordinary life a personal, social or traditional constructed rule, standard
or ideal is the guide; once the spiritual journey has begun, this must be
replaced by an inner and outer rule or way of living necessary for our
self-discipline, liberation and perfection, a way of living proper to the path
we follow or enjoined by the spiritual guide and master, the Guru, or else
dictated by a Guide within us. But in the last state of the soul’s infinity and
freedom all outward standards are replaced or laid aside and there is left only
a spontaneous and integral obedience to the Divine with whom we are in union
and an action spontaneously fulfilling the integral spiritual truth of our being
and nature.
* *
It is this
deeper sense in which we must accept the dictum of the Gita that action
determined and governed by the nature must be our law of works. It is not,
certainly, the superficial temperament or the character or habitual impulses
that are meant, but in the literal sense of the Sanskrit word our “own being”,
our essential nature, the divine stuff of our souls. Whatever springs from this
root or flows from these sources is profound, essential, right; the rest – opinions,
impulses, habits, desires – may be merely surface formations or casual vagaries
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of the being or
impositions from outside. They shift and change, but this remains constant. It
is not the executive forms taken by Nature in us that are ourselves or the
abidingly constant and expressive shape of ourselves; it is the spiritual being
in us – and this includes the soul-becoming of it – that persists through time
in the universe.
We cannot,
however, easily distinguish this true inner law of our being; it is kept
screened from us so long as the heart and intellect remain unpurified from
egoism: till then we follow superficial and impermanent ideas, impulses,
desires, suggestions and impositions of all kinds from our environment or work
out formations of our temporary mental, vital, physical personality – that
passing experimental and structural self which has been made for us by an
interaction between our being and the pressure of a lower cosmic Nature. In
proportion as we are purified, the true being within declares itself more clearly;
our will is less entangled in suggestions from outside or shut up in our own
superficial mental constructions. Egoism renounced, the nature purified, action
will come from the soul’s dictates, from the depths or the heights of the
spirit, or it will be openly governed by the Lord who was all the time seated
secretly within our hearts. The supreme and final word of the Gita for the
Yogin is that he should leave all conventional formulas of belief and action,
all fixed and external rules of conduct, all constructions of the outward or
surface Nature, Dharmas, and take refuge in the Divine alone. Free from desire and
attachment, one with all beings, living in the infinite Truth and Purity and
acting out of the profoundest deeps of his inner consciousness, governed by his
immortal, divine and highest Self, all his works will be directed by the Power
within through that essential spirit and nature in us which, knowing, warring,
working, loving, serving, is always divine, towards the fulfilment of God in
the world, an expression of the Eternal in Time.
A divine
action arising spontaneously, freely, infallibly from the light and force of
our spiritual self in union with the Divine is the last state of this integral
Yoga of Works. The truest reason why we must seek liberation is not to be
delivered, individually, from the sorrow of the world, though that deliverance
too will
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be given to us, but that
we may be one with the Divine, the Supreme, the Eternal. The truest reason why
we must seek perfection, a supreme status, purity, knowledge, strength, love,
capacity, is not that personally we may enjoy the divine Nature or be even as
the gods, though that enjoyment too will be ours, but because this liberation
and perfection are the divine Will in us, the highest truth of our self in
Nature, the always intended goal of a progressive manifestation in the
universe. The divine Nature, free and perfect and blissful, must be manifested
in the individual in order that it may manifest in the world. Even in the
Ignorance the individual lives really in the universal and for the universal
Purpose, for in the very act of pursuing the purposes and desires of his ego,
he is forced by Nature to contribute by his egoistic action to her work and
purpose in the worlds; but it is without conscious intention, imperfectly done,
and his contribution is to her half-evolved and half-conscient, her imperfect
and crude movement. To escape from ego and be united with the Divine is at once
the liberation and the consummation of his individuality; so liberated,
purified, perfected, the individual – the divine soul – lives consciously and
entirely, as was from the first intended, in and for the cosmic and
transcendent Divine and for his Will in the universe.
In the Way of
Knowledge we may arrive at a point where we can leap out of personality and
universe, escape from all thought and will and works and all way of Nature and,
absorbed and taken up into Eternity, plunge into the Transcendence; that,
though not obligatory on the God-knower, may be the soul’s decision, the turn
pursued by the self within us. In the Way of Devotion we may reach through an
intensity of adoration and joy union with the supreme All-Beloved and remain
eternally in the ecstasy of his presence, absorbed in him alone, intimately in
one world of bliss with him; that then may be our being’s impulsion, its
spiritual choice. But in the Way of Works another prospect opens; for travelling
on that path, we can enter into liberation and perfection by becoming of one
law and power of nature with the Eternal; we are identified with him in our
will and dynamic self as much as in our spiritual status; a divine way of works
is the natural outcome of this union; a divine living
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in a spiritual freedom
the body of its self-expression. In the Integral Yoga these three lines of
approach give up their exclusions, meet and coalesce or spring out of each
other; liberated from the mind’s veil over the self, we live in the Transcendence,
enter by the adoration of the heart into the oneness of a supreme love and
bliss, and all our forces of being uplifted into the one Force, our will and
works surrendered into the one Will and Power, assume the dynamic perfection of
the divine Nature.
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