Prabuddha Bharata or Awakened India

Sri Aurobindo one of the profoundest thinkers of the modern times has righly remarked in his Essays on the Gita The language of the Gita the struture of thought the combination and balancing of ideas belong neither to the temper of a sectarian teacher nor to the spirit of a rigorous analytical dialectic cutting off an angle of the Truth to eclude all the others ; but rather there is [...] Sri Krishna the supemystic addressed the whole world through his worthy disciple Arjuna on the battle-field of Kurukshetra and pointed out at the very outset that the supreme quest of human life is not the acquisition of pelf and power but the realisation of the infinite glory of the soul which the 'weapons cannot cut the fire cannot burn water cannot wet and the wind cannot dry' (Chap. [...] The religious instinct in humanity is not a surviving memory of primitive fear of the powers of nature but is humanity's inborn expression of a tesion implanted in it by the Universal Life of which it is a part a tension of desire for release from the restrictions of physical life into the freedom of the life of the spirit ; release from the tainasa into the sattva as it is expressed in the [...] The result of that tendency is seen in the splitting up and weakening of the spirtual body of humanity and the now almost uncontrollable activity of every kind of device and inducement to draw humanity away from the liberation of the spirit to the slavery of the senses against which the religions are powerless. [...] In a spiritualised democracy the sole purpose of whose existence is the liberty of the citizen the only person who can be entrusted with the task of governing the country is he who has renounced the pleasures of the world.