Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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But let us clearly understand that they must not be interpreted, as the modern pragmatic tendency concerned much more with the present affairs of the world than with any high and far-off spiritual possibility seeks to interpret them, as na mt>re_j:han a philosophical and religious justification of social service, patriotic, cosmopolitan and humanitarian effort and attachment to the hundred eager social schemes and dreams which attract the modem intellect. It is not the rule of a large moral and intellectual altruism which is here announced, but tWt of a spiritual unky with God and with this world of beings who dwell in him and in whom he dwells. It is not an injunction to subordinate the individual to society and humanity or immolate egoism on the altar of the human collectivity, but to fulfil the individual in God and to sacrifice the ego on the one true altar of the all-embracing Divinity. The Gita moves on a plane of ideas and THE PRINCIPLE OF DIVINE WORKS experiences higher than those of the modern mind which is at the stage indeed of a struggle to shake oft the coils of egoism, but is still mundane in its outlook and intellectual and moral rather than spiritual in its temperament. (Patriotism, cosmo- politanism, service of society, collectivism, humani- tarianism, the ideal or religion of humanity are admirable aids towards our escape from our primary condition of individual, family, social, national egoism into a secondary stage in which the individual realises, as far as it can be done on the intellectual, moral and emotional level^!^ — on that level he cannot do it entirely in the right and perfect way, the way of the integral truth of his being, — the oneness of his existence with the existence of other beings.. But the thought of the Gita reaches beyond to a tertiary condition of our developing self-consciousness towards which the secondary is only a partial stage of advance.'
The Indian social tendency has been to subordinate the individual to . the claims of society, but Indian religious thought and spiritual seeking have been always loftily individualistic in their aims. An Indian system of thought like the Gita’s cannot possibly fail to put first the development of the individual, the highest ne63 of the individual, his claim to discover and exercise his largest spiritual freedom, greatness, splendour, royalty, — his aim to develop into the illumined seer and king in the spiritual sense of seerdom and kingship, which was the first great charter of the ideal humanity promulgated by the ancient Vedic sages. To exceed himself was their goal for the individual, not by losing all his personal aims in the aims of an organised human society, but by enlarging, heighten- ing, aggrandizing himself into the consciousness^ the Godhead. The rule given here by the Gita is the rule for the master man, the superman, the divinised human being, j the Best, not in the sense of any Nietzschean, any'^ onesided and lopsided, any Olympian, Apollonian or Dionysian, any angelic or demoniac supermanhood, but in that of the man whose whole personality has been offered up into the being, nature and consciousnes§^of . the one tran^ndent and universal Divinity and by loss of the smaller self has found its greater self, has been divinised)
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