Page 25 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

War and the Gita

Man and the Battle of Life
Thus, if we are to appreciate in its catholicity the teaching of
the Gita, we must accept intellectually its standpoint and coura-
geous envisaging of the manifest nature and process of the world.
The divine charioteer of Kurukshetra reveals himself on one side
as the Lord of all the worlds and the Friend and omniscient Guide
of all creatures, on the other as Time the Destroyer "arisen for the
destruction of these peoples." The Gita, following in this the spir-
it of the catholic Hindu religion, affirms this also as God; it does
not attempt to evade the enigma of the world by escaping from it
through a side-door. If, in fact, we do not regard existence merely
as the mechanic action of a brute and indifferent material Force
or, on the other hand, as an equally mechanical play of ideas and
energies arising out of an original Non-Existence or else reflected
in the passive Soul or the evolution of a dream or nightmare in the
surface consciousness of an indifferent, immutable Transcendence
which is unaffected by the dream and has no real part in it, — if we
accept at all, as the Gita accepts, the existence of God, that is to say
of the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, yet always transcen-
dent 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
difficult act of faith. Finding himself in a world which is apparently
a chaos of battling powers, a clash of vast and obscure forces, a life
which subsists only by constant change and death, menaced from
every side by pain, suffering, evil and destruction, he has to see
the omnipresent Deity in it all and conscious that of this enigma

All India Magazine, October 2025 25