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

There is an intermediary idea, a more mystical view of Avatarhood w^hich supposes that a human soul calls down this descent into himself and is either possessed by the divine consciousness or becomes an effective reflection or channel of it. This view rests upon certain truths of spiritual THE PROCESS OF AVATARHOOD 2experience. iXhe di vine bi rth in man, Ihis ascent, i^its^f_.a growin^of th(^human into the divine cpnsciousnessV and in its intensest culmination is a losing of the separate self in that. (The ^oul merges its individuality in an infinite an4 universal being of Tbses^r in 'th^lieights of a transcendent being; it becomes one wkh the Seif, the Brahman, the Divine or, as it is sometimes more absolutely put, becomes jthe one Self, the Brahman, the Divine. The Gfta i^elf speaks of the soul becoming the Brafunan, brahmabhuta, and of its thereby dwelling in the Lord, in KrisTina, but it does not, it must be marked, speak of it as becomfng the Lord or the Purushottama, though it does declare that the Jiya himself is always Lshwara, the partial _being of the LpfdJ mamaivdngah. For this greatest union, this highest becoming is still part of the ascent ; while it is the divine birth to which every Jiva arrives, it is not the descent of the Godhead, not Avatarhood, but at most Buddhahood according to the doctrine of the Buddhists, ll^it is the soul awakened from its present mundane individuality into an infinite superconsciousness. That need not carry with it either the inner consciousness or the characteristic action of the AvatarJ