''...the crown of the Vedanta is only for the highest; the moral calamities that arise from the attempt of an unprepared soul to identify Self with God is sufficiently indicated in the legend of Indra and Virochana.
Similarly this higher ethic is for the prepared, the initiated only, because the raw and unprepared soul will seize on the non-distinction between sin and virtue without first compassing the godlike purity without which such non-distinction is neither morally admissible nor actually conceivable.
From this arises the unwillingness of Hinduism, so ignorantly attributed by Europeans to priest-craft and the Brahmin, to shout out its message to the man in the street or declare its esoteric thought to the shoeblack & the kitchen-maid. The sword of knowledge is a double-edged weapon; in the hands of the hero it can save the world, but it must not be made a plaything for children.
Krishna himself ordinarily insists on all men following the duties & rules of conduct to which they are born and to which the cast of their temperaments predestined them. Arjouna he advises, if incapable of rising to the higher moral altitudes, to fight in a just cause because that is the duty of the caste, the class of souls to which he belongs.
Throughout the Mahabharata he insists on this standpoint that every man must meet the duties to which his life calls him in a spirit of disinterestedness,—not, be it noticed, of self-abnegation, which may be as much a fanaticism and even a selfishness as the grossest egoism itself.
It is because Arjouna has best fulfilled this ideal, has always lived up to the practice of his class in a spirit of disinterestedness and self-mastery that Krishna loves him above all human beings and considers him and him alone fit to receive the higher initiation.''
स एवायं मया तेऽद्य योगः प्रोक्तः सनातनः । भक्तोऽसि मे सखा चेति रहस्यं ह्येतदुत्तमम् ॥
"This is that ancient Yoga which I tell thee today; because thou art My adorer and My heart's comrade; for this is the highest mystery of all."
Sri Aurobindo - Notes on the Mahabharata
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Illustration from the web: Arjuna awaits humbly at the feet of Sri Krishna. In contrast Duryodhana sees himself fit to sit at the head of the bed.
