Sankhya Philosophy and the Three Gunas of Being

The Bhagavad Gita, the sublime Song of the Indians, is, as I mentioned yesterday, said by qualified persons to be the most important philosophic poem of humanity, and he who goes deeply into the sublime Gita will consider this expression fully justified. We shall take the opportunity given by these lectures to point out the high artistic merit of the Gita, but, above all, we must realise the importance of this poem by considering what underlies it, the mighty thoughts and wonderful knowledge of the world from which it grew, and for the glorification and spreading, of which it was created. This glance into the fundamental knowledge contained in the Gita is especially important, because it is certain that all the essentials of this poem, especially all relating to thought and knowledge are communicated to us from a pre-Buddhistic stage of knowledge, so that we may say: The spiritual horizon which surrounded the great Buddha, out of which he grew, is characterised in the contents of the Gita. When we allow these to influence us, we gaze into a spiritual condition of old Indian civilisation in the pre-Buddhist age. We have already emphasised that the thought contained in the Gita is a combined out-pouring of three spiritual streams, not only fused into one another, but moving and living within one another, so that they meet us in the Gita as one whole. What we there meet with as a united whole, as a spiritual out-pouring of primeval Indian thought and perception, is a grand and beautiful aspect of knowledge, an immeasurable sum of spiritual knowledge; an amount of spiritual knowledge so vast that the modern man who has not yet studied Spiritual Science cannot help feeling doubts as to such an amount of knowledge and depth of science, having no possible standard with which to compare it. The ordinary modern methods do not assist one to penetrate the depths of know ledge communicated therein; at the most, one can but look upon that here spoken of as a beautiful dream which mankind once dreamt. From a merely modern standpoint one may perhaps admire this dream, but would not acknowledge it as having any scientific value. But those who have already studied Spiritual Science will stand amazed at the depths of the Gita and must admit that in primeval ages the human mind penetrated into knowledge which we can only re-acquire gradually by means of the spiritual organs which we must develop in the course of time. Their admiration is aroused for the primeval insight that existed in those past ages. We can admire it because we ourselves are able to re-discover it in the universe and thereby confirm the truth of it. When we rediscover it and recognise its truth, we then confess how wonderful it really is that in those primeval ages men were able to raise themselves to such spiritual heights! We know, to be sure, that in those old days mankind was specially favoured, in that the remains of the old clairvoyance was still alive in human souls, and that not only through a spiritual meditation attained by using special exercises were men led into the spiritual worlds, but also that the science of those days could itself, in a certain sense, be penetrated by the knowledge and ideas which the remains of the old clairvoyance brought. We must confess that today we recognise, for quite other reasons, the correctness of what is there communicated to us, but we must understand that in those old times delicate distinctions as regards the being of man were arrived at by other means; ingenious conceptions were drawn from that which man was able to know: conceptions clearly outlined, which could be applied to the spiritual as also to external physical reality. So that in many respects, if we simply alter the expressions we use today to suit our different standpoint, we find it possible to understand the former standpoint also.