Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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atmdnam srijdmi/' The action implied in the word riiimK^abliya is a forceful downward pressure by which the object controlled is overcome, oppressed, blocked or limited in its movement or working and becomes helplessly subject to the controlling {>ower, avagam vagdt ; Nature in this action becomes mechanic^ and its multitude of creatures are held helpless in^ the mechanism, not lords of their own action. \On the contrary the action implied in the word qdhishihdyiu& a dwelling in, but also a standing upon a rid oyer the Na ture, a conscious control and government by the indwclling Godhead, adhishthdtri devatd, in which the Purusha is not helplessly driven by the Prakriti through ignorance, but rather the Prakriti is full of the light and the will of the Purusha. There- fore in jhe. normal birth that. which is loosed, forth, — created, as we say, — is^he multitude oLxreatures or becomings, bhutagrdmam ; in the .divine b ixth tKat which is loosed forth, self -created, is the sel f- conscious self-existent being, dtmdnar^ for the Vedantic distinction between dtmd and bhutdni is that which is made in Europeanjjhilosophy between the Being and its becomings. In both cases Maya is the meyis of the creation or manifestation, l^t Tn the divine birth it is by selFMay^^^ma- mdyayd, not. the involution in the lowef Maya (Jnthe ignorance, but the conscious action of the s^-^existent Godhead in its phenomenal self- I'epresentation, well aware of its operation and its p\irposer — that which the Gita calls el^wHere Yog^- nm^7(ijin^ihej3rdinary JbIrth. Y^aihaya is . used by the Divin e to envelop and conceal itself from, the lower consciousness, so it, becomes for us the. meam of the ignorance, avidyd-mdyd hjjt it is by dns ^me Yogamaya that self-knowle^e also is made manife st i n the return of our consciousness tojthe Kyine, it is the means of the knowledge, yi dyd- mdyd ; and in the divine birth it so operates — as the knowledge controlling and enlightening the works which are ordinarily done in the Ignorance.
The language of the Gita shows therefore that the divine birth is that of the conscious Godhead THE POSSIBILITY AND PURPOSE OF AVATARHOOD in our humanity and essentially th^oggosite ordinary binh ^^ though the same means are usg^ beSuse it is not the birth the Ignorance, Blit the birth of the knowledge^) not a physical phenomenon, but a soul-birth. It is the SouVs coming into birth as the self-existent Being con- trolling consciously its becoming and not lost to self- knowledge in the cloud of the ignorance, it is the Soul born into the bo dy as Lord of HNaturCj, operating in her freely by its wilK not jentangled and helplessly driven round and round in the mechanism; for At works in the Imowledge and not, as most do, in the ignorance, it is the secret Soul in all coming forward from its governing secrecy behind the veil to possess wholly in a human type, but as the Divine, the birth which ordinarily it possesses only from behind the veil as the Ishwara while the outward consciousness in front of the veil is rather possessed than in posses- sion because there it is a partially conscious being, the Jiva lost to self-knowledge and bound in its f orks through a phenomenal subjection to Nature.
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