Part Three. Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921 On
Ideals and Progress
Yoga and Skill in Works
Yoga is skill in works.
Gita
Yoga, says the Gita, is skill in works, and by this
phrase the ancient Scripture meant that the transformation of mind and being to
which it gave the name of Yoga brought with it a perfect inner state and faculty
out of which the right principle of action and the right spiritual and divine
result of works emerged naturally like a tree out of its seed. Certainly, it did
not mean that the clever general or politician or lawyer or shoemaker deserves
the name of a Yogin; it did not mean that any kind of skill in works was Yoga,
but by Yoga it signified a spiritual condition of universal equality and
God-union and by the skill of the Yogic worker it intended a perfect adaptation
of the soul and its instruments to the rhythm of the divine and universal Spirit
in a nature liberated from the shackles of egoism and the limitations of the
sense-mind.
Essentially, Yoga is a generic name for the processes
and the result of processes by which we transcend or shred off our present modes
of being and rise to a new, a higher, a wider mode of consciousness which is not
that of the ordinary animal and intellectual man. Yoga is the exchange of an
egoistic for a universal or cosmic consciousness lifted towards or informed by
the supra-cosmic, transcendent Unnameable who is the source and support of all
things. Yoga is the passage of the human thinking animal towards the
God-consciousness from which he has descended. In that ascent we find many
levels and stages, plateau after plateau of the hill whose summit touches the
Truth of things; but at every stage the saying of the Gita applies in an ever
higher degree. Even a little of this new law and inner order delivers the soul
out of the great peril by which it had been
overtaken in its worldward descent, the peril of the ignorance by which the
unillumined intellect, even when it is keenest or sagest, must ever be bound and
limited, of the sorrow and sin from which the unpurified heart, even when it
wears the richest purple of aspiration and feeling, must ever suffer soil and
wound and poverty, and of the vanity of its works to which the undivinised will
of man, even when it is most vehement and powerful or Olympian and victorious,
must eternally be subject. It is the utility of Yoga that it opens to us a gate
of escape out of the vicious circle of our ordinary human existence.
The idea of works, in the thought of the Gita, is the
widest possible. All action of Nature in man is included, whether it be internal
or external, operate in the mind or use the body, seem great or seem little.
From the toil of the hero to the toil of the cobbler, from the labour of the
sage to the simple physical act of eating, all is included. The seeking of the
Self by thought, the adoration of the Highest by the emotions of the heart, the
gathering of means and material and capacity and the use of them for the service
of God and man stand here on an equal footing. Buddha sitting under the Bo-tree
and conquering the illumination, the ascetic silent and motionless in his cave,
Shankara storming through India, debating with all men and preaching most
actively the gospel of inaction are all from this point of view doing great and
forceful work. But while the outward action may be the same, there is a great
internal difference between the working of the ordinary man and the working of
the Yogin,– a difference in the state of the being, a difference in the power
and the faculty, a difference in the will and temperament.
What we do, arises out of what we are. The existent is
conscious of what he is; that consciousness formulates itself as knowledge and
power; works are the result of this twofold force of being in action. Mind, life
and body can only operate out of that which is contained in the being of which
they are forces. This is what we mean when we say that all things act according
to their nature. The divine Existence is pure and unlimited being in possession
of all itself, it is sat; whatever it puts forth in its limitless purity of self-awareness is truth of itself,
satya; the divine knowledge is knowledge of the Truth, the divine Will is
power of the Truth, the divine workings are words and ideas of the Truth
realising themselves in manifold forms and through many stages and in infinite
relations. But God is not limited or bound by any particular working or any
moment of time or any field of space or any law of relation, because He is
universal and infinite. Nor is He limited by the universe; for His infinity is
not cosmic, but supracosmic.
But the individualised being is or acts as if he were
so bound and limited, because he treats the particular working of existence that
he is and the particular moment of time and field of space in which it is
actually operating and the particular conditions which reign in the working and
in the moment and in the field as if they were self-existent realities and the
binding truth of things. Himself, his knowledge, his force and will, his
relations with the world and his fellows, his need in it and his desire from
them he treats as the sufficient truth and reality, the point of departure of
all his works, the central fact and law of his universe. And from this egoistic
error arises an all-vitiating falsehood. For the particular, the individual can
have no self-existence, no truth, no valid force except in so far as it reflects
rightly and relates and conforms itself justly to the universal, to the
all-being, the all-knowledge, the all-will and follows its true drift towards
self-realisation and vast delight in itself. Therefore the salvation of the
individual lies in his universalising himself; and this is the lesson which life
tries always to teach him but the obstinate ego is always unwilling to learn;
for the universal is not any group or extended ego, not the family, community,
nation or even all mankind, but an infinite far surpassing all these
littlenesses.
Nor is the universalising of himself sufficient for
liberation, although certainly it will make him practically more free and in his
being nearer to the true freedom. To put himself in tune with the universal is a
step, but beyond the universal and directing and determining it is the
supracosmic Infinity; for the universe also has no self-existence, truth or
validity except as it expresses the divine Being, Knowledge, Will, Power,
Delight of Him who surpasses all universe, so
much that it can be said figuratively that with a petty fragment of His being
and a single ray of His consciousness He has created all these worlds. Therefore
the universalised mind must look up from its cosmic consciousness to the
Supernal and derive from that all its sense of being and movement of works. This
is the fundamental truth from which the Yogic consciousness starts; it helps the
individual to universalise himself and then to transcend the cosmic formula. And
this transformation acts not only on his status of being but on his active
consciousness in works.
The Gita tells us that equality of soul and mind is
Yoga and that this equality is the foundation of the Brahman-state, that high
infinite consciousness to which the Yogin aspires. Now equality of mind means
universality; for without universality of soul there may be a state of
indifference or an impartial self-control or a well-governed equality of
temperament, but these are not the thing that is meant. The equality spoken of
is not indifference or impartiality or equability, but a fundamental oneness of
attitude to all persons and all things and happenings because of the perception
of all as the One. Such equality, it is erroneously thought, is incompatible
with action. By no means; this is the error of the animal and the intellectual
man who thinks that action is solely possible when dictated by his hopes, fears
and passions or by the self-willed preferences of the emotion and the intellect
justifying themselves by the illusions of the reason. That might be the fact if
the individual were the real actor and not merely an instrument or secondary
agent; but we know well enough, for Science and Philosophy assure us of the same
truth, that the universal is the Force which acts through the simulacrum of our
individuality. The individual mind, pretending to choose for itself with a
sublime ignorance and disregard of the universal, is obviously working on the
basis of a falsehood and by means of an error and not in the knowledge and the
will of the Truth. It cannot have any real skill in works; for to start from a
falsehood or half-truth and work by means of blunders and arrive at another
falsehood or half-truth which we have immediately to change, and all the while
to weep and struggle and suffer and have no
sure resting-place, cannot surely be called skill in works. But the universal is
equal in all and therefore its determinations are not self-willed preferences
but are guided by the truth of the divine will and knowledge which is unlimited
and not subject to incapacity or error.
Therefore that state of the being by which the Yogin
differs from the ordinary man, is that by which he rises from the foundation of
a perfect equality to the consciousness of the one existence in all and
embracing all and lives in that existence and not in the walls of his body or
personal temperament or limited mind. Mind and life and body he sees as small
enough things which happen and change and develop in his being. Nay, the whole
universe is seen by him as happening within himself, not in his small ego or
mind, but within this vast and infinite self with which he is now constantly
identified. All action in the universe he sees as arising in this being, out of
the divine Existence and under the stress of the divine Truth, Knowledge, Will
and Power. He begins to participate consciously in its working and to see all
things in the light of that divine truth and governance; and even when his own
actions move on certain lines rather than others, he is not bound by them or
shut to the truth of all the rest by his own passions and preferences, gropings
and seekings and revolts. It is evident that such an increasing wideness of
vision must mean an increasing knowledge. And if it be true that knowledge is
power, it must mean also an increasing force for works. Certainly, it would not
be so, if the Yogin continued to act by the light of his individual reason and
imagination and will; for the intellect and all that depends on it can only work
by virtue of rigid limitations and exclusive determinations. Accordingly, the
continued activity of the unillumined intellect and its servants conflicts with
the new state of consciousness and knowledge which arises out of this larger
existence, and so long as they remain active, it cannot be perfect or assured;
for the consciousness is being continually pulled down to the lower field of
ego-habit by the claim of their narrow workings. But the Yogin ceases,
progressively, to act by the choice of his intellectual or emotional nature.
Another light dawns, another power and presence
intervenes, other faculties awake in the place of the old human-animal
combination.
As the state of being changes, the will and temperament
must necessarily be modified. Even from an early stage the Yogin begins to
subordinate his personal will or it becomes naturally subordinate to the sense
of the supreme Will which is attracting him upward. Ignorantly, imperfectly,
blunderingly it moves at first, with many recoils and relapses into personal
living and personal action, but in time it becomes more in tune with its Source
and eventually the personal will merges upward and all ways into the universal
and infinite and obeys implicitly the transcendent. Nor does this change and
ascension and expanding mean any annihilation of the will-power working in the
individual, as the intellectual man might imagine; but rather it increases it to
an immense forcefulness while giving it an infinite calm and an eternal
patience. The temperament also is delivered from all leash of straining and
desire, from all urge of passion and pain of wilful self-delusion. Desire, even
the best, turns always to limitation and obscuration, to some eager exclusive
choice and pressure, to some insistent exclusion of what should not be excluded
and impatient revolt against the divine denials and withholdings. It generates
anger and grief and passion and obstinacy, and these bring about the soul’s loss
of its divine memory or steadfast consciousness of itself and its self-knowledge
and its equal vision of the truth of things. Therefore desire and its brood are
incompatible with skill in works and their persistence is the sign of an
imperfect Yoga.
Not only must the will and fundamental knowledge-view
of things change, but a new combination of faculties take the place of the old.
For if the intellect is not to do all our mental work for us or to work at all
in its unillumined state and if the will in the form of desires, wishes,
intellectual preferences is not to determine and enforce our action, then it is
clear that other powers of knowledge and will must awaken and either replace the
intellect and the mental preference or illumine and guide the one and transform
and dominate the other. Otherwise either the action may be nil or else its
impulses mechanical and chaotic, even if the
static being is blissfully enlarged; for they will well up indeed out of the
universal and not the personal, but out of the universal in its lower formula
which permits the erratic action of the heart and mind, while the old personal
will and reason will not be there to impose some light and order on their
ill-connected impulsions. Such faculties and new combination of faculties can
and do emerge and they are illuminations and powers that are in direct touch and
harmony with the light and power of the Truth; therefore in proportion as they
manifest and take hold of their functions, they must increase the force,
subtlety and perfection of the Yogin’s skill in works.
But the greatest skill in works of Yoga is that which
to the animal man seems its greatest ineptitude. For all this difficult
attainment, the latter will say, may lead to anything you please, but we have to
lose our personal life, abandon our personal objects, annul our personal will
and pleasure and without these life cannot be worth living. Now the object of
all skill in works must be evidently to secure the best welfare either of
ourselves or of others or of all. The ordinary man calls it welfare to secure
momentarily some transient object, to wade for it through a sea of grief and
suffering and painful labour and to fall from it again still deeper into the
same distressful element in search of a new transient object. The greatest
cunning of Yoga is to have detected this cheat of the mind and its desires and
dualities and to have found the way to an abiding peace, a universal delight and
an all-embracing satisfaction, which can not only be enjoyed for oneself but
communicated to others. That too arises out of the change of our being; for the
pure truth of existence carries also in it the unalloyed delight of existence,
they are inseparable in the status of the infinite. To use the figures of the
Vedic seers, by Yoga Varuna is born in us, a vast sky of spiritual living, the
divine in his wide existence and infinite truth; into that wideness Mitra rises
up, Lord of Light and Love who takes all our activities of thought and feeling
and will, links them into a divine harmony, charioteers our movement and
dictates our works; called by this wideness and this harmony Aryaman appears in
us, the Divine in its illumined power, uplifted force of being and all-judging effective will; and by the three comes the indwelling Bhaga, the
Divine in its pure bliss and all-seizing joy who dispels the evil dream of our
jarring and divided existence and possesses all things in the light and glory of
Aryaman’s power, Mitra’s love and light, Varuna’s unity. This divine Birth shall
be the son of our works; and than creating this what greater skill can there be
or what more practical and sovereign cunning?
overtaken in its worldward descent, the peril of the ignorance by which the
unillumined intellect, even when it is keenest or sagest, must ever be bound and
limited, of the sorrow and sin from which the unpurified heart, even when it
wears the richest purple of aspiration and feeling, must ever suffer soil and
wound and poverty, and of the vanity of its works to which the undivinised will
of man, even when it is most vehement and powerful or Olympian and victorious,
must eternally be subject. It is the utility of Yoga that it opens to us a gate
of escape out of the vicious circle of our ordinary human existence.
