Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)

For in the Vedantic view of things all these apparently formidable objections are null and void from the beginning. The idea of the Avatar is not indeed indispensable to its scheme, but it comes in naturally into it as a perfectly rational and logical conception. For all here is God, is the Spirit or Self-existence, is Brahman, ekamevadwitiyarrij— there is nothing else, nothing other and different from it and there can be nothing else, can be nothing other and different from it ; Na ture js and can be nothing else -than a power of the divine conscious- ness ; all bei ngs a re and can be nothing else than inMr and outer, si^ective and objective soul-forms and bodily forms ,o£lhe divine being which exist in or result from the power of its consciousness. Far from the Infinite being unable to take on finiteness, the whole universe is nothing else but that ; we can see, look as we may, nothing else at all in the whole wide world we inhabi^ Far from the Spirk being inc^able of form or <|isdain|ng to connect itself with form of matter or mmd ahd to assume a limited nature or a body, all here is nothing but that, the world exists only by that connection, that assump2tion. Far from the world being a mechanism of law with no soul or spirit intervening in the move- ment of its forces or the action of its minds and bodies, — only some original indifferent Spirit passively existing somewhere outside or above it, — the whole world and every particle of it is on the contrary hodiing but the divine force in action and that divine force determines and governs its every movement, inhabits its every form, possesses here every soul and mind ; all is in God and in him moves and has its being, in all he is, acts and dis- plays his being ; every creature is the disguised Narayana^ Far from the unborn being unable to assume birth, all beings are even in their individuality un- born spirits, eternal without beginning or end, and in their essential existence and their universality all are the one unborn Spirit of whom birth and death are only a phenomenon of the assumption and change of forms. The assumption of imperfection by the perfect is the whole mystic phenomenon of the universe ; but the imperfection appears in the form and action of the mind or body assumed, subsists in the phenomenon, — in that which assumes it there is no imperfection, even as in the Sun which illumines all there is no defect of light or of vision, but only in the capacities of the individual organ of vision, ^or does rul e the world 3from some remote heaven, but by his intimate omn^reseime ,* each finite working of force is an act olr Infiiiite Force and not of a limited separate THE J^SHfetLlTY AND PURPOSE OF AVATARHOOD self-existent energy labouring in its own underived strength j in every finite working of will and knowledge we can discover, supporting it, an act of the infinite all-will and all-knowledge. God’s rule is Mt an absentee, foreign and external govern- ment ; ^e governs all because he exceeds all, but al^_becai^e he dwells within all movements and is their absolute soul and spirit. Therefore none of the objections opposed by our reason to the possibility of Avatarhood can stand in their principle ; for the principle is a vain division made by the intellectual reason which the whole pheno- menon and the whole reality of the world are busy every moment contradicting and disproving)