THE DIVINE WORKER The Sign of Divine Work To attain to the divine birth, — a divinising new birth of the soul into a higher consciousness, — and to do divine works both as a means towards that before it is attained and as an expression of it after it is attained, is then all the Karmayoga of the Gita. The Gita does not try to define works by any outward signs through which it can be recognisable to an external gaze, measurable by the criticism of the world; it deliberately renounces even the ordinary ethical distinctions by which men seek to guide themselves in the light of the human reason. The signs by which it distinguishes divine works are all profoundly intimate and

MAN AND THE BATTLE OF LIFE The Faith we must have ... If we accept at all, as the Gita accepts, the existence of God, that is to say, of the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, yet always transcendent Being who manifests the world and Himself in the world, who is not the slave but the lord of His creative Consciousness, Nature or Force (Maya, Prakriti or Shakti), who is 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 dif

THE SUPREME SECRET The Final Word After giving out all the laws, the Dharmas, and the deepest essence of its Yoga, after saying that beyond all the first secrets revealed to the mind of man by the transforming light of spiritual knowledge, gūhyāt, this is a still deeper more secret truth, guhyataram, the Gita, suddenly declares that there is yet a supreme word that it has to speak, paramam vaccah, and a most secret truth of all, sarvagūhyatamam. This secret of secrets the Teacher will tell to Arjuna as his highest good because he is the chosen and beloved soul, ista. For evidently, as had already been declared by the Upanishad, it is only the rare soul chosen by the Spir

AVATAR HOOD Two aspects of Divine Birth For there are two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness, madbhāvam āgatah; it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatar hood and the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve. This double aspect in the Gita's doctrine of Avatar hood is apt to be missed by the cursory reader satisfied, as most are, with catching a superficial view of its profound teachings, and it

THE MESSAGE OF THE GITA What then is the message of the Gita and what its working value, its spiritual utility to the human mind of the present day after the long ages that have elapsed since it was written and the great subsequent transformations of thought and experience? The human mind moves always forward, alters its viewpoint and enlarges its thought substance, and the effect of these changes is to render past systems of thinking obsolete or, when they are preserved, to extend, to modify and subtly or visibly to alter their value. The vitality of an ancient doctrine consists in the extent to which it naturally lends itself to such a treatment; for that means that wh

THE DIVINE TEACHER A Unique Feature The peculiarity of the Gita among the great religious books of the world is that it does not stand apart as a work by itself, the fruit of the spiritual life of a creative personality like Christ, Mahomed or Buddha or of an epoch of pure spiritual searching like the Veda and Upanishads, but is given as an episode in an epic history of nations and their wars and men and their deeds and arises out of a critical moment in the soul of one of its leading personages face to face with the crowning action of his life, a work terrible, violent and sanguinary, at the point when he must either recoil from it altogether or carry it through to its

OUR DEMAND AND NEED FROM THE GITA The world abounds with Scriptures sacred and profane, with revelations and half-revelations, with religions and philosophies, sects and schools and systems. To these the many minds of a half-ripe knowledge or no knowledge at all attach themselves with exclusiveness and passion and will have it that this or the other book is alone the eternal Word of God and all others are either impostures or at best imperfectly inspired, that this or that philosophy is the last word of the reasoning intellect and other systems are either errors or saved only by such partial truth in them as links them to the one true philosophical cult.

Introduction This book has been compiled entirely from Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita. The compilation has been done by a sadhak who is a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In 1972, he had mentioned to the Mother his aspiration to bring out a small book on the Gita, of about 100 pages, specially suited to the young. The Mother had approved and blessed the project. However, due to various reasons, the compiler could take up the work only in 1987. Now that it is completed he gratefully offers it at the feet of the Master and the Mother. The Gita has a message for all. In this compilation the stress has been on those passages which could inspire the Youth and guide an

THE GITA FOR THE YOUTH A Compilation from the Writings of Sri Aurobindo SRI AUROBINDO SOCIETY PONDICHERRY First edition 1989 Second impression 1995 ISBN 81-7060-039-1 © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1989 Compiled by Guru Pershad Published by Sri Aurobindo Society, Pondicherry Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA

THE YOGA OF DIVINE LOVE Four Types of Bhaktas It is Bhakti with knowledge which the Gita demands from the disciple and it regards all other forms of devotion as good in themselves but still inferior; they may do well by the way, but they are not the thing at which it aims in the soul's culmination. Among those who have put away the sin of the rajasic egoism and are moving towards the Divine, the Gita distinguishes between four kinds of Bhaktas. There are those who turn to him as a refuge from sorrow and suffering in the world, ārta. There are those who seek him as the giver of good in the world, arthārthī. There are those who come to him in the desire for knowledge