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BHAGAVAD GITÀ
is based on millenniums of introspection, as a result of which experience the creative processes of the human psyche have been accepted as man's best clues to the powers, activitics, and attitudes of the world-creative supramundane Being. In the process of evolving a dream world of dream scenery and dream people-supplying also a heroic dream double of our own cgo, to endure and enjoy all sorts of strange adventures-we do not suffer the least diminution, but on the contrary realize an expansion of our personal substance. Unseen forces manifest themselves in all these images and by so doing enjoy then selves, realize themselves. It is likewise with God, when he pours forth his creative māyā-force. Nor is our psychic substance diminished by the sending forth of the sense forces through the gates of the sense organs to grasp the sense objects, swallow them, and present them to the mind; nor again is the mind diminished when it shapes itself to the patterns thus offered by the sense organs, copying them exactly in its own subtle substance-which is claylike, soft and malleable.R3 Such activities, whether in dream or in waking, arc expansive, self-delighting exercises of man's vital essence, which is ready for and casily capable of the facile selftransformations. Man's work therein is a microcosmic counterpart of the creative principle of the universe. God's māyā shapes the universe by taking shape itself, playing through all the transitory figures and bewildering events, and therein it is not the least diminished, but on the contrary only maguified and expanded.
The field of the inicromacrocosmic manifestation was characterized in the Sankhya in terms of an unceasing interplay of the three constituents or qualities of praksti, the so-called guņas. 84 In the Bhagavad Gitā, this idea is taken over but completely assimilated into the Vedic Brāhmanical conception of the one and only Self. “Whatever states there may be of the
88 Cf. supra, pp. 284-285 and 288-289. 84 Supra, pp. 295-297.
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| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |