Gita XIII (addendum)—The Individual self

Our intellectual nature produces self-consciousness; it leads to the emergence of the human individual from its original solidarity with nature. Most of us, by finding our specific place in the social world, give a meaning to our life and gain a feeling of security, a sense of belonging. Any sense of satisfaction and security derived by submission to external authority is bought at the price of the integrity of the self. By developing our inner spiritual nature, we gain a new kind of relatedness to the world and grow into freedom, where the integrity of the self is not compromised. We then become aware of ourselves as active creative individuals, living, not by the discipline of external authority but by the inward rule of free devotion to truth.

The individual self is a portion of the Lord, a real, not an imaginary form of the supreme, a limited manifestation of God. The soul which derives from the Supreme Isvara is not so much an emanation as a member of the Supreme. The soul’s substantial existence springs from the Divine intellect and its expression in life is effected by virtue of its vision of Divine who is its father and its ever-present companion. Its distinctiveness is determined by the divine pattern and the context of the senses and the mind which it draws to itself. The universal is embodied in a limited context of mental-----vital-physical sheath. No individual is quite like another, no life repeats another’s and yet a single pattern runs through all of them. The essence of ego, the distinguishing characteristic of human personality is a certain creative unity, an inner purpose, a plan which has gradually shaped itself into an organic unity.