Krishna Prem on the Mahat Atman - commentary on Chapter 10 of the Bhagavad Gita

[Don Salmon]

 Here is Sri Krishna Prem's commentary on chapter 10 of the Bhagavat Gita.  In it, he gives the “method” by which one can learn, through intuition, to “see” the “Above” - the “upper hemisphere of Being” - reflected in the “Below”, the “lower hemisphere.

 

CHAPTER X: THE YOGA OF THE PERVADING POWERS

 

Seeking nothing, give thyself utterly to Me.  These words will serve to summarize the teaching that has up to now (up to Chapter IX), been given.  But who is it who thus claims allegiance from the Soul?  “Worship thou Me,” Says Krishna, and His words find echo in the saying of Christ: “No man cometh to the Father save through Me.”  Sectarian creeds in East and West have fastened on these sayings and urged the personal and unique greatness of their own particular Teacher, Son of God or very God Himself, incarnate in the world to save the souls of men.  For either we must think these Great Ones were deluded in thus proclaiming themselves the sole Way to the Highest, or else we must suppose, which is indeed the case, that it is not as separate individual beings that they speak but as the unborn, beginningless Eternal, the Brahman in which all abide, “by which all this is pervaded.”

It is the knowledge of this One Eternal that, from the seventh chapter onwards, is growing in the heart of the disciple.  This is the knowledge which “having known, naught here remains to know.” (Gita, VIII, 2).  It is not enough to know the merely individual Christ or Krishna, though indeed, as we shall see at the conclusion of the whole teaching, there is a secret, the most purely mystical of all, hidden in the heart of what we term their personalities.  There is a direct Path to the inmost heart of Reality, one that proceeds straight through what may be termed the concrete infinity of the Divine Lord who shows forth with human limbs the action of the Actionless, who utters with human speech the voiceless Wisdom of the Eternal.  But the context shows that it is not with that most secret path of all that we are here concerned, but rather with the Divine Presence that stands, pervading all.

 

[Verse 2] It is as that Brahman that Sri Krishna here speaks, the Brahman out of Which all beings come and into Which all will in time return.  Its secrets are for ever hidden in that uncreated Darkness.   Nor God nor Sage can know Its rootless being, for from It all come forth, and he who plunges in to know Its utmost mystery is God or man no more, his being all dissolved in blazing Light that yet is darkness to the highest dualistic knowing.

 

[Verses 4, 5] All we can know is that all separate qualities, the various states of mind some positive, some negative, exist in unity as moments of that blazing Darkness and from it issue forth to shine in men as separate states of being...

[Verse 7] ...On all the planes of cosmos is the one as immanent pervading Power (vibhuti) united with the forms by mystic yoga (see previous chapter), and therefore it is said that he who knows in essence this pervading power and yoga of the Supreme unites with Him in firm unwavering yoga.

 

[Verse 8] “I am the source of all,” says Krishna, “by me all revolves.”  As Mula-Prakriti, He is the Source of all the forms and, as the One transcendent Self, it is His yoga that throws them into motion.  The ordinary man sees nothing but the passing forms, in them he puts his hopes, in them is fixed his being.  Forms come and he feels happy; they go and sorrow overwhelms his mind, for never can it be that forms shall stand for ever.  But the disciple, seeing thus the source and life of all as one, is rooted in that One and remains blissful though all the forms around him change and pass.

 

[Verse 10] To such as can thus root themselves in Him, serving Him ever with the worship born of love, He gives the buddhi-yoga, that union with the buddhi by which they go to Him.  The buddhi is the wisdom which sees the One in All; it also is the faculty by which that vision is acquired.  We have seen how the individual self is balanced between the centrifugal and the centripetal forces.  United to the lower levels the self flows outwards into forms and dies, as it were, with them, while united to the higher it is carried Homewards by the inflowing cosmic tides.

 

[Verse 11] “Out of pure compassion for them, dwelling within their Self, I destroy the ignorance born darkness by the shining lamp of Wisdom.”

It should not be thought that this compassion is something capricious, something given or withheld at will like a Maharaja’s favor.  The sun’s rays shine on all alike; without them all would die. But he who would feel their warmth upon his skin must leave his shut-in cave and seek the open air.  Similarly, he who would experience the Divine Compassion in his soul must leave the cave of self and seek the wider being.  He must strive upwards, outwards from his self, breaking the barriers till the Homeward-flowing tides are felt and sweep him off his feet.

 

These Homeward tides that sweep the upper planes of being, sometimes termed, “Grace,” are the Divine Compassion which will bear the soul up to the one Eternal, but, before they can be felt, the disciple must strive desperately with all his might to cling to Krishna, and by his own unaided efforts break down the prison walls. [Footnote: The term Grace, however, if used at all, is better reserved for a mysterious Power, testified to by mystics of East and West, a power tha iw wielded alike by Krishna and the human Guru, and which is so ultimate that it baffles all attempts at intellectual formulation.  All we can say is that it is utterly free and that it is rooted in that aspect of the Supreme and Eternal One that manifests in us as personality.”]

 

To him who says “show us the Lord and it sufficeth us” comes the reply “that which in highest in thyself is He, as much of Him as thou canst see as yet.  Cling then to that and thou shalt go to Him.”

Clinging thus to Krishna, the mind becomes irradiated by the Light of the One Atman shining serenely through the buddhi overhead.  The effect of this irradiation is that the intellectual knowledge of the mind is vivified and rendered luminously certain by the buddhi's direct intuition.  This is shown very clearly in the Gita in the twelfth and following verses.

 

[Verse 12] “Thou are the Great Eternal, the Great Light, the pure and stainless One, Divine, eternal Man, primal Divinity, Unborn and all-pervading.”

[Verse 13] All this was known before as abstract truth, testified to by all the Seers of the past, but “now Thou Thyself sayest it to me.”  A new and rapturous warmth whose source is in the buddhi pervades the mind which soars beyond itself.  New vistas, like a landscape half-perceived, open before the mental gaze and the old words and thoughts, words formerly believed, known intellectually to be the truth, now shine transformed within a magic light never before perceived.  Useless to try to state in words this new perception with its luminosity. It shows in the note of ecstasy that sounds through Arjuna's words.  It is as if one strumming idly on a windless organ should suddenly hear the notes sounding forth in answer to the keys. The thoughts that were but thoughts, bare intellectual concepts, greyly self-sufficient, now waken colored harmonies that echo through the arches of what seemed a void before.  No longer are things seen as separate units but as the interlinked and shining web of a vast splendid pattern still but half-perceived.

 

[Verse 15] To change this twilit half-perception into the sunshine of true knowledge further advance is needed.  It si by the Atman itself that the Atman is gained [Krishna Prem is quoting the Katha Upanishad here], or, as the Gita puts it, “Thou thyself knowest Thyself by Thyself, O Highest Purusha, Sender forth of beings, Light of the Shining Ones, Ruler of the World!”

Even the buddhi shines not by its own light.  Beyond it is the Light of the Great Atman, the Cosmic Ideation in which the Divine archetypes of past, present and future exist in one vast interpenetrative whole. [Footnote: Compare Plotinus vi, 9, Enneads, “Thus we come to the Nous (Divine Mind) almost as an object of sense: the Intellectual Kosmos is perceptible as standing above soul, father to soul... a multiple but at once indivisible and comporting difference.”  (my own note: one might also consider Jim Kowall's reflections on science and nonduality, and the implications of holography – see nonduality.com).  Here is the splendid pattern of the Cosmos radiant with Divine Light, a wondrous unity of spiritual Beings.

 

“For There everything is transparent, nothing dark, nothing resistant; every being is lucid to every other, in breadth and depth; light runs through light.  And each of them contains all within itself, and at the same time sees all in every other, so that everywhere there is all, all is all, and each all, and infinite the glory.  Each of them is great; the small is great: the sun, There, is all the stars, and every star again is all the stars and sun.  While some one manner of being is dominant in each, all are mirrored in every other. [Plotinus, Enneads, v, tractate 8].

 

All that is in the world is what it is because of the reflection of some portion of that glorious Being.  In it the unity of all the manifold is found.  It is, as has been said before, the topmost edge of manifested being, what lies beyond is all unmanifest.  [Verse 16] The soul, united to the buddhi (buddhi-yukta), must now ascend this snowy peak of being, must see, first by the mental eye, and at last by direct spiritual vision, those Divine Glories by which the Supreme stands pervading all the worlds.  These are the Divine Ideas spoken of by Plato, the pervading Powers (vibhuti) that are the subject of this chapter.

 

The phrase “Divine Ideas” should not mislead the reader (as it has misled many intellectuals) into thinking that they are pale abstractions, the conceptual “universals” of academic philosophy.  These “ideas” are not conceptual abstractions at all, but living Spiritual Powers which, as the Gita says, “stand” in their own nature eternally and are reflected in the flux of beings, giving to each its form and its essential nature, not abstracted from beings but formative of beings, the perfect types and patterns fo all things here below:

“Out of the dark it wrought the heart of man,

Out of dull shells the pheasant's penciled neck:

Ever at toil, it brings to loveliness

All ancient wrath and wreck.”

 

To reach this Divine world is now the task of the disciple and therefore Arjuna asks:

[Verse 17] “O Yogi, how may I know Thee by constant meditation?  In what aspects are Thou to be thought of by me, O Glorious One?” [Footnote: Note that Krishna is here addressed as “yogi” because it is on this plane that the Wondrous Yoga, the yogamaishwaram, takes place.  It is here that the one unmanifested Self (Shanta Atman) unites with the one unmanifested Nature (Mula-prakriti]

 

The Divine Realities cannot be seen by eyes of flesh; nor by, it may be added the so-called clairvoyant eye of pseudo-occultism, an eye whose realm at best is that of psychic forms.  The eye by which they must be seen is that of buddhi, the eye of spiritual vision. [Sri Krishna Prem's footnote: Cf. Hermes, vi, 4: “For all the things that fall beneath the eye are image things and pictures as it were, while these that do not meet the eyes are the realities.”

 

But though that eye is now available for the disciple he must first learn to open it and to habituate himself to its use. Just as a man, though having as his birthright mind with all its powers of thinking, yet has to learn by slow and arduous steps how to unfold those powers, so the disciple who has now united mind with buddhi must slowly and with effort open up its powers of vision.  The mental life in which he still is, for the most part, rooted must be transmuted by the higher vision.  A man born blind, but who has gained his sight, finds for some time the new sense unfamiliar and rather trusts his highly cultivated sense of touch with all its limitations than this strange power of sight which now has opened.

Therefore the Teacher now sets forth a method, a discipline by which the soul may learn to use the eye of buddhi and to trust its baffling, unfamiliar vision more than the familiar seeing the mind. [Footnote: The mind sees by analysis and separation, splitting the unity of life into the separate aspects named and pinned like insects on the board it calls science. The buddhi sees the unity in all and therefore Krishna teaches Arjuna how the Divine Pervading Powers are to be looked for in the things below.]

 

The verses which follow (20-42) are not to be considered as the self-praise of  a merely personal God so dear to theists.  Again it must be said, the “I” who speaks is not just the personal Krishna but he Great Atman, One and manifold, pervading by Its Powers all things that are.  These verses contain the practical method by which the soul may learn to use and trust its eye.

 

The disciple is instructed to try to see in all things, not their separate being, but the Great Atman, by whose Powers all have their form and nature.  Each type of being on earth is what it is because of the “reflection” of some aspect of that Atman. [Footnote: “We do not mean that the Idea, locally separate, shows itself in Matter like a reflection in water; the Matter touches the Idea at every point, though not by physical contact, and by dint of neighborhood – nothing to keep them apart – is able to absorb thence all that lies within its capacity, the Idea itself not penetrating, not approaching, the Matter, but remaining self-locked” (Plotinus, Vi, v, 8)].  This “reflection” is best seen in those objects which are pre-eminent within their class, for it is in them that the Divine Archetype has best found expression. T his is the meaning of the list that Krishna gives.  In all beings, gods or men or sages, so-0called “inanimate” objects or in mental qualities, “He” is to be sought out and contemplated in the chief of every class. [Footnote: compare Plotinus, vi, 9: “Things here are signs; they show therefore to the wiser teachers how the supreme God is known; the instructed priest reading the sign may enter the holy place and make real the vision of the inaccessible.”]  For He indeed is verily the Atman in all beings, their very Self, the base on which they stand.

 

[Verses 21-38] What makes the gods shining and powerful?  It is the Light and Power of the one.  What makes the Vedas holy, worth of our reverence?  It is the ancient Archetypal Wisdom.  What is it that calls forth our aspirations in the sight of mountain peaks, calms us in sheets of water, whispers to us in trees, disturbs our hearts in animals or thrills in gleaming weapons? [Footnote: In spite of man's ill-treatment of and contempt for the “lower animals” he has always felt a disturbing sense of something strange and archetypal in their being.  This is the underlying cause of the “totemism” of sl-called primitive peoples, of the animal-gods of the Egyptians (so distasteful to both pagan Greek and Christian) and of the animal signs in the Zodiac.]  What is it but Him shining through all these beings in spiritual Powers to which, if we give names, they are but poor translation for our weakness?

[Verse 36] Even in the greatly wicked, in him who says to evil “Be thou my good,” in the fierce pride of Duryodhana, in such a type of monstrous wickedness as Shakespeare's Richard the Third, we feel His presence compelling wonder, even admiration, in spite of all the protests of our moral nature. 

We must not turn from these perceptions as mere poetic fancies, saying, as many do, that, after all, in fact an animal is but an animal; a sword, a strip of steel.  What is thus felt in beings is not a fancy but something truly, if but vaguely, seen within.  The disciple must cling to these intuitive perceptions and by constant meditation sharpen them to clearness until the outer forms seem unreal things through whose translucid shells the wondrous Powers shine in their gleaming splendours [my note: not all Indian teachers consider the outer forms “unreal things”; in particular, the greatest Tantric teachers like Abhinavagupta see the forms as having a Divine Reality in a rather dramatically different way than taught by many current “neo-Vedantins” as well as followers of Shankara; though to be fair to Sri Krishna Prem, he does say “seem unreal”].  

 

As he proceeds a change will overtake his vision.  Not only will he see the spiritual Power in each form, but since these Powers are united in a living Whole, he will begin to see, what before he could but think, the vast interconnectedness of all things. [Footnote: These connections, vaguely intuited, give life to poetry and art.  What the poet dimly senses and dares not take for more than metaphor is clearly seen by the awakened seer.  It may also be added that the use of those affinities is an essential part of Kabalistic and other forms of magic, white or black.]

 

“In our realm all is part arising from part and nothing can be more than partial; but There each being is an eternal product of a whole and is at once a whole and an individual manifestation as part but, to the keen vision There, known for the whole it is.” (Plotinus, v, 8).

 

Thus to the seeing eye all things are linked to all in a great Cosmic Harmony.  Flowers in the green are seen as one with the far-distant stars gleaming for every in the blue abyss of space.  Within this six-foot frame blow all the winds of heaven and in the heart of man lie still the glittering pomp, the sometimes cruel beauty, and all the hidden secrets of long-vanished empires buried now beneath the desert sands or ocean waves.

There is a story current that on certain days, if one go out to sea from the town known as Dwarka, beneath the waves can dimly be descried the towers and pinnacles of Krishna's island city.  Legend, no doubt, for Dwarka was not there.  Nevertheless beneath the storm-tossed surface of our hearts the vanished past still lives.  Unseen within these depths the ancient wars are fought, Atlantis shines in glory, darkens with pride and falls; Sri Krishna walks the earth and Buddha leaves his home for love of men.

Nothing is lost, for ever all remains, deep in the waters of eternal Mind.  He who can plunge within lives in the Cosmic Heart and sees Its mighty throbs send forth the cycling years to run their changing courses through the worlds back ot the blue depths of Eternity.

 

It is said that in a lotus-seed exists in miniature a perfect lotus.  So in that Might Being is the seed of all that is, subtle beyond all images of sense, the shining spiritual Cosmos; Infinite seeds and yet one wondrous Seed, beyond the reach of mind, yet to be seen by Mind. [Footnote: Gita, x, verses 39-42. Compare this with the so-called Nassene document.  “Accordingly they (the Egyptians) declare concerning the Essence of the Seed which si the cause of all things in the world of generation, that it is none of these things, but that it begets and makes all generated things saying, 'I become what I will and am what I am.'  Therefore that which moves all is unmoved; for It remains what it is, making all things, and becoming no one of the things produced”]

 

[Verse 40] All that is glorious, beautiful, or mighty shines by reflection of a portion of that Being.  Vainly we seek on earth a symbol grand enough to adumbrate Its glories.  In ancient Egypt and Chaldea the starry heaven was Its only symbol; the heaven with its interlinked and patterned stars whirling in gleaming harmonies around the pole.  But all the splendors of the cosmic depths, their mind-annihilating magnitudes of time and space, symbol to all men of eternal Law and Beauty, are but a moment of the Mighty Atman; infinities ranged on the shoulders of infinities; a wondrous hierarchy of living spiritual Powers where each is each and each is All and all dance forth in ecstasy the Cosmic Harmony. [Footnote: This Cosmic Harmony, known to Pythagoreans as the music of the spheres, was in the Vedic tradition termed rita, the cosmic order in which all the gods exist. Those who find in the Vedas mere chaotic polytheism and those who find incipient monotheism are alike mistaken.  Unity indeed there was, but it was not the unity of a personal being but of Divine impersonal Cosmic Order within which Indra, Varuna and Agni, the whole pantheon of Gods, all shone and had their being.]

[Verse 42] Vast beyond thought as is this spiritual realm, this flaming Cosmos of Divine Ideas, yet still beyond lies That, the One Eternal, the Parabrahman, Rootless Root of all. Beyond all Gods, beyond all time and space, beyond al lbeing even, flames Its dark transcendent Light. [Footnote: Strictly speaking, between the Great Atman and the Parabrahman are the unmanifested Two. For convenience they are here included in the Supreme Unmanifested One.]

 

From that Eternal Brahman issue forth the Mighty Atman, great beyond all thought, and all the countless starry worlds that fill the wide immensities of space.  Yet so vast is Its spaceless, timeless grandeur that all these wondrous emanated worlds are as a drop taken from out the ocean, leaving Its shoreless being ever full. Therefore Sri Krsihna, speaking for That Brahman, says, “having established this entire universe with one fragment of Myself, I remain.”

“That is the Full; this is the full;

From that Full has this full come forth;

Having taken the full from the Full

Verily the Full Itself remains.” (Ishopanishad)

 

[Peter Jones]

Thanks Don. No argument from me.