Bhagavagd Gita - Session 25- Track 2506

Now, to re-emphasise it, I will give you another statement. So, here also we have the description of Moksha, what is Moksha and what is perfection (The Synthesis of Yoga p.425&426):

“The state of the liberated soul is that of the Purusha who is for ever free. Its consciousness is a transcendence and an all-comprehending unity. Its self-knowledge does not get rid of all the terms of self-knowledge, but unifies and harmonises all things in God and in the divine nature.”

Purushottama and Para Prakriti, God and the divine Nature: all things are held to be united. This sense of unity is fundamental in Moksha.

“The intense religious ecstasy which knows only God and ourselves and shuts out all else, is only to it an intimate experience which prepares it for sharing in the embrace of the divine Love and Delight around all creatures.”

Sri Aurobindo refers to that experience of a Bhakta, when he feels united with the supreme Lord, and finds himself alone with the supreme Lord: it is an ecstasy, but this is not a perfect experience. Perfect experience comes when this experience expands so as to embrace all; not merely you and God, alone, but in which all are united: that is the integral experience of liberation.

“A heavenly bliss which unites God and ourselves and the blest, but enables us to look with a remote indifference on the unblest and their sufferings is not possible to the perfect soul;”

There is another experience where you feel one with God and also in union with others who are also like you, who are blest and who live in the presence of God, but who do not feel sympathy or union with all others who are still unblest. That kind of limitation is not present in the mukta ātmā: one who is free, one who has attain to Moksha feels union with God, feels union with all others who are also blest, but also feels union who are not blest. His heart goes out to all the others and wants to uplift them also.

“For these are also its selves;”

Even those who are unblest are also for this liberated soul its own selves.

“; free individually from suffering and ignorance, it must naturally turn to draw them also towards its freedom. On the other hand, any absorption in the relations between self and others and the world to the exclusion of God and the Beyond is still more impossible, and therefore it cannot be limited by the earth or even by the highest and most altruistic relations of man with man.”

There is another kind of experience in which you may feel union with all, but without God. Surely, this is an impossibility: you can truly feel union with all only when you are united with God. But many people today in this world…there is a new formula: “Service to man is service to God.” Now, this sentence is not false but it can be taken falsely in the sense that if you serve man, you don’t need to serve God. To serve man is to serve God, therefore if you serve man then it is accounted that you have served God: now, this mistake we should not commit. You can serve man, and see God in man and therefore you can say ‘I am serving God’. But at the same time, this proposition is true if you are aware that God is all, and it is by serving God that you are serving all.

“Its activity or its culmination is not to efface and utterly deny itself for the sake of others, but to fulfil itself in God-possession, freedom and divine bliss that in and by its fulfilment others too may be fulfilled. For it is in God alone,…

For it is in God alone, by the possession of the Divine only that all the discords of life can be resolved, and therefore the raising of men towards the Divine is in the end the one effective way of helping mankind.”