Thursday, April 17, 2014

IX: 8

Chapter 9, Verse 8

"Through my nature,
Again and again,
I send forth
The myriad forms of life."

Paramahansa Yogananda:

At the start of another cycle, God awakens Nature and causes her to resume the manifest display where materialized beings act out their parts on the "screen" of time and space.

These cycles of evolution and involution are eternal.  The show goes on.  One by one the actors become liberated and are replaced by new cast-members.  A portion of God's consciousness will always be engaged in the unfoldment of phenomenal worlds, the stage whereon a multitude of his children perform their roles until, through Self-realization, they earn an honorable discharge.

Sri Aurobindo:

Ignorant, the Jiva is subject to Nature's cyclic whirl, not master of itself, but dominated by her.  Only by a return to the divine consciousness can it attain to mastery and freedom.  The divine, too, follows the cycle, not as subject to it, but as its informing spirit and guide.

Father Bede Griffiths:

There is a force which causes all beings to come into existence.  It drives them on in their course, brings them back and then again drives them out again.  This force is Karma, the force of Nature, and it is the cause of the world.  We find in Krishna's teaching another idea that, over and above Karma, is the personal God who by his grace directs the course of things.

We each have our own Karma.  We come into being because of inevitable laws, and we have a particular nature because of these laws and are driven by this nature; yet there is something in us that is free from these laws.  The grace of God comes and releases us from the power of this Karma.

This closely resembles the Christian of original sin.  We are all born into this condition as the result of primordial sin, without being able to help it.  From infancy we are conditioned by our heredity, our environment and all the forces around us, and our lives are largely shaped by the forces of the unconscious.  However, there is in everybody a principle of freedom, very minute at first, like a grain of mustard seed, having the power to respond to the grace of God.  When this touches us, it is able to set us free from this law of Karma and the bondage of original sin.

[A danger here is to focus so much on the mystery and miracle of God's grace as to fail to recognize the importance of personal dedication and effort.  Effort and grace are the two wings of a rocket which escapes the gravitational pull of the Karmic past.  Honoring both wings, a sense of balance ensues, and the rocket gains altitude.  Eventually, that glorious moment will arrive when the gravitational field will be left behind, once and for all.]

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