Chapter Three
The Human Disciple
Note 3.1
Arjuna as the Struggling Human Soul
▀ ▄ ▀ Arjuna as the Struggling Human Soul
We have just seen that the divine Teacher of the Gita is the eternal Avatar. He is the Divine who has descended into the human consciousness. He is the Lord who is seated within the heart of all beings.
From behind the veil, he guides all our thoughts and actions and heart’s seeking. At the same time He also directs from behind the veil of visible and sensible forms and forces and tendencies the great universal action of the world.
This is the same world which he has manifested in his own being.
When we are able to pull apart this veil and get behind our apparent self to see face to face this real Self, at that time all the strife of our upward endeavour and seeking finds its culmination.
For this purpose :
▀ We need to get behind our apparent self to this real Self and realize our whole being in this true Lord of our being.
▀ We need to give up our personality to and into this one real Person.
▀ We have to merge our ever-dispersed and ever-converging mental activities into His plenary light.
▀ We have to offer up our errant and struggling will and energies into His vast, luminous and undivided Will.
▀We have to at once renounce and satisfy all our dissipated outward-moving desires and emotions in the plentitude of His self-existent Bliss.
The knowledge of all the highest teaching other than eternal knowledge of this World Teacher is only the reflection and partial word. This is the voice to which the hearing of our soul has to awaken.
Arjuna is a counterpart of this conception. He is the disciple who receives his initiation on the battlefield.
He is the type of the struggling human soul who has not yet received the knowledge. However, he has grown fit to receive this divine knowledge by action in the world in a close companionship and an increasing nearness to the higher and divine Self in humanity.
Some have preferred to explain Gita in such a particular method that this episode as well as the whole of Mahabharata is turned into
▀ An allegory of inner life.
▀ It has nothing to do with our outward human life and action.
▀ It concerns only with the battles of the soul and the powers that strive within us for possession.
However, that view is not justified by the general character and the actual language of the epic. If we still persist in representing it in this manner, it would turn the straightforward philosophical language of the Gita into a constant, laborious and somewhat childish mystification.
Agreed that the language of the Veda and part at least of the Puranas is plainly symbolic. It is full of figures and concrete representations of things that lie behind the veil.
On the other hand, the Gita is written in plain terms and professes to solve the great ethical and spiritual difficulties raised by the life of man. It will not serve our purpose to forcibly look behind this plain language and thought and wrest them to the service of our fancy. However, there is at least this much truth in the view that the setting of the doctrine, though not symbolical, is certainly typical. It is quite natural for the setting of such a discourse as the Gita. This is essential if the Gita is to have any relation at all with that which it frames.
▀ ▄ Chapter Three - Note 1 ▄ ▀
The Human Disciple
.......... to continue
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