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

divine than death or that we must not move towards the replacement of physical force by soul-force, of ^r By peace, of strife by union, of devouring by jbye, oF egoism by: universality, of death by immortal life._ God is not only the Destroyer, but the Friend ^ features ; not only the cosmic Trinity, but the Transcendent; the terrib le Kali is also the loving and beneficent Mother ; the lord of Kurukshetra isT the divine comrade and charioteer, the attracter of beings, incarnate Krishna. And Whithersoever he is drivii§“ ftfroughT’ all the strife and clash and confusion, to whatever goal or godhead he may be attracting us, it is — no doubt of that — to some transcendence of all these aspects upon which we have been so firmly insisting. But where, how, with what kind of transcendence, under what conditions, this we have to discover ; and to discover it, the first necessity is to see the world as it is, to observe and value rightly his action as it reveals itself at the start and now ; afterwards the way and the goal will better reveal themselves. We mu st acknowledge Kurukshetra ; we must submit to the law of Fife by DeatlT^fore we can find^burWay to the life immortal ; we must open our eyes, with a less appalled gaze than Arjuna's, to the vision of our Lord of Time and Death antfTease to deny, hate or recoil from the universal Destroyer.

Thus, if we are to appreciate in its catholicity the teaching of the Gita, we must accept intellectually its standpoint and courageous envisaging of the manifest nature and process of the world. The diyine charioteer of Kurukshetra reveals hiimelf on one side as the Lord of all the worlds ~and~lEe Triend and omniscient Guide of all creatures, on the other jw Time the TJesfroyer “arisen for the destruction of these peoples.” The Gita, following in this the spirit of the catholic Hindu religion affirms tins also as God ; it doesjiot attempt to evade the eni^a of the world by escaping^from it through a side-door. If, in fact, we do not regard existence merely as the mechanic action of a brute and indifferent material Force or, on the other hand, as an equally mechanical play of ideas and energies arising out of an original Non-Existence or else reflected in the passive Soul or the evolution of a dream or nightmare in the surface consciousness of an indifferent, immutable Transcendence which is unaffected by the dream and has no real part in it, — if we accept at all, as the G ita accepts , the existence of God, that is to say oTthe onmipr^seat* omn^iSi^Jq^ yet alimys transcendent MAN AND THE BATTLE OF LIFE

Bei ng w ho m anife sts the world and Hi m self in the world, who is not the slave but the lord of His creative Consciousness, Nature or Force (Maya, Pr^ nH"d f~~Shakti), who ls“^ not baffled or thwarted in His world-conception or design by His creatures, man or devil, who does not need to justify Himself by shifting the responsibility for any part of His creation or manifestation on that which is created or manifested, then the human being has to start from a great, a difficult act of faith. Finding himself in a ^orld which is apparently a chaos of battlii^ powers, a cksh of vast aiffl obscure For^s, a life i^TcEJsubsists only by constant diange and death, menaced from every side by psun, sufering, evil and destruction, he has to see the omnipresent Deity in it al l^and conscious that of this enigma there must be a solution and beyond this Ignorance in which he dwells a Knowledge that reconciles, he has to take his stand upon this faith, “Though Thou slay me, yet will I trust in Thee.“ All human thought or faith that is active and affirmative, whether it be theistic, pa ntheisti c or at heistic d oes in fact involve more or less explicitly and completely such an attitude. It admits and it believes: admits the di scords of the wo rld, believes in some highest pri nciple o f God, univeml ^hg 6f Nature which sfiaU enable us to tra nsce ndroverco me o r harmonise t hese discords , perhaps even to do all three at once, to harmonise by overcoming and transcending.