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

^!^ut still, apart from the possibility, there is the question of the actual divine working, — whether actually the divine consciousness does appear coming forward from beyond the veil to act at all directly in the phenomenal, the finite, the mental and material, the limited, the imperfect. TheJLnite is indeed nothing but a definition, a face-value the Infinite’s self-representations to its own variations of consciousness ; the real value of each finite phenomenon is an infinite in its self-existence, whatever it may be in the action of its phenomenal nature, its temporal self-representation. The man is not, when we look closely, himself alone, a rigidly separate self-existent individual, but humanity in a mind and body of itself ; and humanity too is no rigidly separate self-existent species or genus, it is the All-existence, the universal Godhead figiSting itself in the type of humanity ; there it works out certain possibilities, develops, evolves, as we now say, certain powers of its manifestations. What it evolves, is itself, is the Spiri^^

For what we mean by Spirit ^ self^xi^ent being, with an infinite power ol cbn^iousn§3s and unconditioned delight in its being ; it is either that or nothing, or at least nothing which has anything to do with man and the world or with which, there- fore, man or the world has anything to do. Matter, body, is only a massed motion of force of conscious being employed as a karting-point for the variaWe relations of consciousness working through its power of sense ; nor is Matter anywhere really >oid_of consciousness,, for even in the atom, the cell there isTas is now made abundantly clear in spite of itself by modern Science, a pow er of wil l, an intelligence at work ; but that power is the power of will and intelligence of the Self, Spirit or Godhead within it, it is not the separate, self-derived will or idea of the mechanical cell or atom. Thi^umversal will and intelligence, involved, deyelo]^ its powers from form to form, and on earth at least it is in mM that it draws nearest to the full divine and tihere first becomes, even in the outward intelligence in the form, obscurely conscious of its, divinity. But still there too there is a limitation, there is that the manifestation which prevents the lower forms, from having, the -self-knowledge-of their identity with the Divine, For in each limited beirtg the limitation of the phenomenal action is

THE POSSIBILITY AND PURPOSE OF AVATARHOOD accompanied by a limitation also of the phenomenal consciousness which defines the nature of the being and makes the inner difference between creature and creature. Q"he Divine works behind indeed and governs its special manifestation through this outer and imperfect consciousness and will, but is itself secret in the cavern, guhdydm, as the Veda puts it, or as the Gita expresses it, the h eart of all existences the Lord abWes turning all existences as _Maya.*’ This scCTet working of 'the Lord hidden in the heart from the egoistic nature-ci)nsciousness through which he works, i s Go d*s universaj method with cre ature s^ A^hy ‘ the n should we suppose that in any form he comes forward into the frontal, the phenomenal consciousness for a more direct and consciously divine action? O^bymusly, if at all, then to break /veil between himself and humanity whic h man lirnited in his own nature could never hft. ^ ™ ^