Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/216

208 form of individual humanity, adfmanam srijam:, and conscious not only behind the veil but in the outward nature.

There is an intermediary idea, a more mystical view of Avatarhood which supposes that a human soul calls down this descent into himself and is either posses- sed by the divine consciousness or becomes an effective reflection or channel of it. This view rests upon certain truths of spiritual experience. The divine birth in man, his ascent, is itself a growing of the human into the divine consciousness, and in its intensest culmination is a losing of the separate self in that. The soul merges its individuality in an infinite and universal being or loses it in the heights of a transcendent being; it becomes one with the Self, the Brahman, the Divine or, as it is sometimes more absolutely put, becomes the one Self, the Brahman, the Divine. The Gita itself speaks of the soul becoming the Brahman, brahmabhiita, and of its thereby dwelling in the Lord, in Krishna, but it does not, it must be marked, speak of it as becoming the Lord or the Purushottama, though it does declare - that the Jiva himself is always Ishwara, the partial being of the Lord, mamaivanshah. For this greatest union, this highest becoming is still part of the ascent; while it is the divine birth to which every Jiva arrives, itis not the descent of the Godhead, not Avatarhood, but at most Buddhahood according to the doctrine of the Buddhists, it is the soul awakened from its present mundane individuality into an infinite superconscious- ness. -That need not carry with it either the inner consciousness or the characteristic action of the Avatar, On the other hand, this entering into the divine consciousness may be attended by a reflex action of