FOURTEENTH CHAPTER

ABOVE THE GUNAS

1. The Blessed Lord said: I will again declare the supreme¹ Knowledge, the highest of all knowings, which having known, all the sages have gone hence to the highest perfection.

2. Having taken refuge in this knowledge and become of like² nature and law of being with Me, they

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1 The distinctions between the Soul and Nature rapidly drawn in the verses of the thirteenth chapter by a few decisive epithets, especially the distinction between the embodied soul subject to the action of Nature by its enjoyment of her gunas, qualities or modes and the Supreme Soul who dwells enjoying the gunas, but not subject because it is itself beyond them, are the basis on which the Gita rests its whole idea of the liberated being made one in the conscious law of its existence with the Divine. That liberation, that oneness, that putting on of the divine nature, sadharmya, it declares to be the very essence of spiritual freedom and the whole significance of immortality. Therefore, says the Gita this is the supreme knowledge because it leads to the highest perfection, and brings the soul to likeness with the Divine. This supreme importance assigned to sa- dharmya is a capital point in the teaching of the Gita.

2 Mark that nowhere in the Gita is there any indication that dissolution of the individual spiritual being into the mimanifest, indefinable or absolute Brahman, avyaktam anir- deshvam, is the true meaning or condition of Immortality or the true" aim of Yoga, On the contrary it describes Immortality later on as an indwelling in the Ishwara in his supreme status, mayi nivasishyasi, param dhama, and liere as sadharmya, param siddhim, a supreme perfection, a becoming of one law of being and nature with the Supreme, persistent still in existence and

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are not born ¹ in the creation, nor troubled by the anguish of the universal dissolution,

3. My womb is the Mahat Brahman; into that I cast the seed; thence² spring all beings, 0 Bharata.

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conscious of the universal movement but above it, as all the sages still exist, munayah sarve, not bound to birth in the creation, not troubled by the dissolution of the cycles.

1 To be immortal was never held in the ancient spiritual teaching to consist merely in a personal survival of death of the body: all beings are immortal in that sense and it is only the forms that perish. The souls that do not arrive at liberation, live through the returning aeons; all exist involved or secret in the Brahman during the dissolution of the manifest worlds and are born again in the appearance of a new cycle. To be immortal in the deeper sense is something different from this survival of death, and this constant recurrence. Immortality is that supreme status in which the Spirit knows itself to be superior to death and birth, not conditioned by the nature of its manifestation, infinite, imperishable, immutably eternal,—immortal, because never being born it never dies. The divine Purushottama, who is the supreme Lord and supreme Brahman, possesses for ever this immortal eternity and is not affected by his taking up a body or by his continuous assumption of cosmic forms and powers because he exists always in this self-knowledge. His very nature is to be unchangeably conscious of his own eternity; he is self-aware without end or beginning. He is here the Inhabitant of all bodies, but as the unborn in every body, not limited in his consciousness by that manifestation, not identified with the physical nature which he assumes; for that is only a minor circumstance of his universal activised play of existence. Liberation, Immortality is to live in this unchangeably conscious eternal being of the Purushottama. But to arrive here at this greater spiritual Immortality the embodied soul must cease to live according to the law of the lower nature; it must put on the. law of the Divine's supreme way of existence which is in fact the real law of its own eternal essence. In the spiritual evolution of its becoming, no less than in its secret original being, it must grow into the likeness of the Divine.

2 The soul of man could not grow into the likeness of the Divine, if it were not in its secret essence imperishably one with the Divine and part and parcel of his divinity: it could not be

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4. Whatever forms are produced in whatsoever wombs, 0 Kaunteya, the Mahat Brahman is their womb, and I am the Father who¹ casts the seed.

. 5. The three gunas born of Prakriti, Sattwa, Rajas and Tamas bind² in the body, 0 great-armed one, the imperishable dweller in the body.

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or become immortal if it were merely a creature of mental, vital and physical Nature. All existence is a manifestation of the divine existence and that which is within us is spirit of the eternal Spirit.

1 He is at once the Father and Mother of the universe; the substance of the infinite Idea, vijnana, the Mahat Brahman, is the womb into which he casts the seed of his self -conception. As the Over-Soul he casts the seed; as the Mother, the Nature- Soul, the Energy filled with his conscious power, he receives it into this infinite substance of being made pregnant with his illimitable, yet self-limiting Idea. He receives into this Vast of self-conception and develops there the divine embryo into mental and physical form of existence born from the original act of conceptive creation. All we see springs from that act of creation.

What is it then that makes the difference, what is if that gets the soul into the appearance of birth and death and bond- age,—for this is patent that it is only an appearance ?

2 It is a subordinate act or state of consciousness, it is a self- oblivious identification with the modes of Nature in the limited workings of this lower motivity and with this self-wrapped ego- bounded knot of action of the mind, life and body that gets the soul' into the appearance of birth and death and bondage. To rise above the modes of Nature, to be Traigunyatita, is indispensable, if we are to get back into our fully conscious being away from the obsessing power of the lower action and to put on the free nature of the spirit and its eternal Immortality. That condition of the sadharmya, is what the Gita next proceeds
to develop.

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6. Of these Sattwa is by the purity of its quality a cause of light and illumination, and by virtue of that purity produces no disease or morbidity or suffering in the nature; it binds ^l by attachment to knowledge and attachment to happiness, 0 sinless one.

7. Rajas, know thou, has for its essence attraction of liking and longing; it is a child of the attachment of the soul to the desire of objects; 0 Kaunteya, it binds the embodied spirit by attachment to works.

8. But Tamas, know thou, born of ignorance, is the deluder of all embodied beings; it binds by negligence, indolence and sleep, 0 Bharala.

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l The Sattwa binds, as much as the other gunas and binds just in the same way by desire, by ego; a nobler desire, a purer ego,—-but so long as in any form these two hold the being-,. there is no freedom. The man of virtue, of knowledge, has his ego of the virtuous man, his ego of knowledge, and it is that sattwic ego which he seeks to satisfy; for his own sake he seeks virtue and knowledge. Only when we cease to satisfy the ego, to think and to will from the ego, the limited " I" in us, then is there a real freedom. In other words, freedom., highest self- mastery begins when above the natural self we see and hold the supreme Self of which the ego is an obstructing veil and a blinding shadow. And that can only be when we see the one Self in us seated above Nature and make our individual being one with it in being and consciousness and in its individual nature of action only an instrument of a supreme Will, the one Will that is really free. For that we must rise high above the three gunas, become trigimatita.

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9. Sattwa attaches to happiness, rajas to action, 0 Bharata; tamas covers up the knowledge and attaches to negligence of error and inaction.¹

10. Now sattwa leads, having overpowered rajas and tamas, 0 Bharata; now rajas, having overpowered sattwa and tamas; and now tamas, having overpowered sattwa and rajas.

11. When into all the doors in the body there comes a flooding of light, ² a light of understanding, perception and knowledge, one should understand that there has been a great increase and uprising of the sattwic guna in the nature.

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1 The soul by attachment to the enjoyment of the gunas and their results concentrates its consciousness on the lower and outward action of life, mind and body in Nature, imprisons itself in the form of these things and becomes oblivious of its own greater consciousness behind in the spirit, unaware of the free power and scope of the liberating Purusha. Evidently, in order to be liberated and perfect we must get back from these things, away from the gunas and above them and return to the power of that free spiritual consciousness above Nature.

These three qualities of Nature are evidently present and active in all human beings and none can be said to be quite devoid of one and another or free from any one of the three;

but they are not constant in any man in the quantitative action of their force or in the combination of their elements; for they are variable and in a continual state of mutual impact, displacement and interaction. Only by a general and ordinary pre- dominance of one or other of the qualities can a man be said to be either sattwic or rajasic or tamasic in his nature; but this can only be a general and not an exclusive or absolute description.

2 The intelligence is alert and illumined, the senses quicken- ed. the whole mentality satisfied and full of brightness and the nervous being calmed and filled with an illumined ease and clarity, prasada. Knowledge and a harmonious ease and pleasure and happiness are the characteristic results of sattwa.

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12. - Greed, seeking impulsions,¹ initiative of actions, unrest, desire—all this mounts in us when rajas increases.

13. Nescience,² inertia, negligence and delusion — these are born when tamas predominates, 0 joy of the Kurus.

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But how does sattwa, the power of knowledge and happi- ness, become a chain ? It so becomes because it is a principle of mental nature, a principle of limited and limiting knowledge and of a happiness which depends upon right following or attainment of this or that object or else on particular states of the mentality, on a light of mind which can be only a more or less clear twilight. Its pleasure can only he a passing intensity or a qualified ease. Other is tlie infinite spiritual knowledge and the free self-existent delight of our spiritual being.

1 It is the .force of desire which motives all ordinary personal initiative of action and all that movement of stir and seeking and propulsion in our nature which is the impetus towards action and works, prawitti. Kajas, then, is evidently the kinetic force in the modes of Nature. Its fruit is the lust of action, but also grief, pain, all kinds of suffering; for it has no right possession of its object—desire in fact implies non- possession—and even its pleasure of acquired possession is troubled and unstable because it has not clear knowledge and does not know how to possess nor can it find the secret of accord and right enjoyment. All the ignorant and passionate seeking of life belongs to the rajasic mode of Nature.

2 It is the darkness of tamas which obscures knowledge and causes all confusion and delusion. Therefore it is the opposite of sattwa, for the essence of sattwa is enlightenment, prakasha, and the essence of tamas is absence of light, nescience, aprakasha. But tamas brings incapacity and negligence of action as well as the incapacity and negligence of error, inattention and misunderstanding or non-understanding; indolence, languor and sleep belong to this guna. Therefore it is the opposite too of rajas; for the essence of rajas is movement and impulsion and kinesis, pravrifti, but the essence of tamas is inertia, a-pravritti. Tamas is inertia of nescience and inertia of inaction, a double negative.

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14. If sattwa prevails when the embodied goes to dissolution,¹ then he attains to the spotless worlds of the knowers of the highest principles.

15. Going to dissolution when rajas prevails, he is born among those attached to action; if dissolved during the increase of tamas, he is born in the wombs of beings involved in nescience.

16. It is said the fruit of works² rightly done is pure and sattwic; pain³ is the consequence of rajasic works, ignorance is the result of tamasic action.

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1 Our physical death is also a pralaya, the soul bearing the body comes to a pralaya, to a disintegration of that form of matter with which its ignorance identified its being and which now dissolves into the natural elements. But the soul itself persists and after an interval resumes in a new body formed from those elements its round of births in the cycle, just as after the interval of pause and cessation the universal Being resumes his endless round of the cyclic aeons.

2 All natural action is done by the gunas, by Nature through her modes. The soul cannot act by itself, it can only act through Nature and her modes. And yet. the Gita, while it demands freedom from the modes, insists upon the necessity of action. Here comes in the importance of its insistence on the abandonment of the fruits; for it is the desire of the fruits which is the. most potent cause of the soul's bondage and by abandoning it the soul can be free in action.

3 Ignorance is the result of tamasic action, pain the consequence of rajasic works, pain of reaction, disappointment, dissatisfaction or transience, and therefore in attachment to the fruits of this kind of activity attended as they are with these undesirable accompaniments there is no profit. But of works rightly done the fruit is pure and sattwic, the inner result is knowledge and happiness. Yet attachment even to these

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17. From sattwa¹ knowledge is born, and greed from rajas; negligence and delusion are of tamas, and also ignorance.

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pleasurable things must be entirely abandoned, first, because in the mind they are limited and limiting forms, and, secondly, because, since sattwa is constantly entangled with and besieged by rajas and tamas which may at any moment overcome it, there is a perpetual insecurity in their tenure. But, even if one is free from any clinging to the fruit, there may be an attachment to the work itself, either for its own sake, the essential rajasic bond, or owing to a lax subjection to the drive of Nature, the tamasic, or for the sake of the attracting rightness of the thing done, which is the sattwic attaching cause powerful on the virtuous man or the man of knowledge. And here evidently the resource is in that other injunction of the Gita, to give up the action itself to the Lord of works and be only a desireless and equal-minded instrument of his will. (See sloka 19.)

1 The three modes of Nature, sattwa, rajas, tamas are described in the Gita only by their psychological action in man, or incidentally in things such as food according as they produce a psychological or vital effect on human beings. If we look for a more general definition, we shall perhaps catch a glimpse of it in the symbolic idea of Indian religion which attributes each of these qualities respectively to one member of the cosmic Trinity, sattwa to the preserver Vishnu, rajas to the creator' Brahma, tamas to the destroyer Rudra. Looking behind this idea for the rationale of the triple ascription, we might define the three modes or qualities in terms of the motion of the universal Energy as Nature's three concomitant and inseparable powers of equilibrium, kinesis and inertia. But that is only their appearance in terms of the external action of Force. Since consciousness is always there even in an apparently inconscient Force, we must find a corresponding psychological power of these three modes which informs their more outward executive action. On their psychological side the three qualities may be defined, tamas as Nature's power of nescience, rajas as her power of active seeking ignorance enlightened by desire and impulsion, sattwa as her power of possessing and harmonising knowledge,

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18. They rise upwards who are in sattwa; those in rajas remain in the middle; l those enveloped in igno- rance and inertia, the effect of the lowest quality, the tamasas, go downwards.

19. When the seer perceives that the modes of Nature are the whole agency and cause of works and knows and turns to That which is supreme above the gunas, he attains to mad-bhava (the movement and status of the Divine).

20. When the soul thus rises above the three gunas born of the embodiment in Nature, he is freed

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l The ordinary human soul takes a pleasure in the customary disturbances of its nature-life; it is because it has this pleasure and because, having it, it gives a sanction to the troubled play of the lower nature that the play continues perpetually; for the Prakriti does nothing except for the pleasure and with the sanction of its lover and enjoyer, the Purusha. The joy of the soul in the dualities is the secret of the mind's pleasure in living. Ask it to rise out of all this disturbance to the unmingled joy of the pure bliss-soul which all the time secretly supports its strength in the struggle and makes its own continued existence possible,—it will draw back at once from the call. The true cause of its unwillingness is that it is asked to rise above its own atmosphere and breathe '3. rarer and purer air of life, whose bliss and power it cannot realise and hardly even conceives as real, while the joy of this lower turbid nature is to it the one thing familiar and palpable. No'- is this lower satisfaction in itself a thing evil and unprofitable ; it is rather the condition for the upward 'evolution of our human nature out of the tamasic ignorance and inertia to which its material being is most subject; it is the rajasic stage of the graded ascent of man towards the supreme self-knowledge, power and bliss. But if we rest eternally on this plane, the madhyama gatih of the Gita, our ascent remains unfinished, the evolution of the soul incomplete. Through the sattwic being and nature to that which is beyond the three gunas lies the way of the soul to its perfection.

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from subjection to birth and death and their concomitants, decay, old age and suffering, and enjoys in the end the Immortality of its self-existence.

21. Arjuna¹ said: What are the signs of the man who has risen above the three gunas, 0 Lord ? What his action and how does he surmount the gunas ?

22. The Blessed Lord said: He, 0 Pandava, who does not abhor or shrink from the operation of enlighten- ment (the result of rising sattwa) or impulsion to works (the result of rising rajas) or the clouding over of the mental and nervous being (the result of rising tamas), nor longs after them, when they cease;

23. He who, established in a position² as of one seated high above, is unshaken by the gunas; who seeing that it is the gunas that are in process of action stands apart immovable;

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1 This question again reveals the pragmatic and practical nature of Arjuna. How can one live and act in the world and yet be above the gunas ? The sign, says Krishna, is that equality of which I have so constantly spoken.

2 He has seated himself in the conscious light of another principle than the nature of the gunas and that greater consciousness remains steadfast in him, above these powers and unshaken by their motions like the sun above clouds to one who has risen into a higher atmosphere. He from that height sees that it is the gunas that are in process of action and that their storm and calm are not himself but only a movement of Prakriti; his self is immovable above and his spirit does not participate in that shifting mutability of things unstable. This

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24-25. He who regards happiness and suffering alike, gold and mud and stone as of equal value, to whom the pleasant and the unpleasant, praise and blame, honour and insult, the faction of his friends and the faction of his enemies are equal things; who is steadfast in a wise imperturbable and immutable inner calm and quietude; who initiates no action (but leaves all works to be done by the gunas of Nature)—he is said to be above the gunas.

26. He also who loves and strives after Me with an undeviating love and adoration, passes beyond the three gunas and he too is prepared for becoming the Brahman.

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is the impersonality of the Brahmic status; for that higher principle, that greater wide high-seated consciousness, kutastha, is the immutable Brahman.

But still there is evidently here a double status, there is a scission of the being between two opposites; a liberated spirit in the immutable Self or Brahman watches the action of an unliberated mutable Nature,—Akshara and Kshara. Is there no greater status, is it the end of Yoga to drop the mutable nature and the gunas born of the embodiment in Nature and disappear into the impersonality and everlasting peace of the Brahman ? There is, it would seem, something else; the Gita refers to it at the close of this chapter, always returning to this one final note.

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27. I¹ (the Purushottama) am the foundation of the silent Brahman and of Immortality and imperishable spiritual existence and of the eternal dharma and of an utter bliss of happiness.

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l There is a status then which is greater than the peace- of the Akshara as it watches unmoved the strife of the gunas. There is a highest spiritual experience and foundation above the immutability of the Brahman, there is an eternal dharma greater than the rajasic impulsion to works, pravritti, there is an absolute delight which is untouched by rajasic suffering and beyond the sattwic happiness, and these things are found and possessed by dwelling in the being and power of the Purusbot- tama. But since it is acquired by bhakti, its status must be that divine delight, Ananda, in which is experienced the union of utter love* and possessing oneness, the crown of bhakti. An to rise into that Ananda, into that inexpressible oneness mu5 be the completion of spiritual perfection and the fulfilment of
the eternal immortalising dharma.

* Niratishayapremaspadatwam anandatattvsam,

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