unborn Lord of creatures, I create (loose forth) my seif by my maya,” presiding over the actions of my Prakriti. Here there is no question of the Lord and the human Jiva or of the Father and the Son, the divine Man, but only of the Lord and his Prakriti. The Divine descends by his own Prakriti into birth in its human form and type and brings into it the divine Consciousness and the divine Power, though consenting, though Wwilling to act in the form, type, mould of humanity, and he governs its actions in the body as the indwelling and " over-dwelling Soul, adhishthiya. From above he governs always, indeed, for so he governs all nature, the human included ; from within also he governs all nature, always, but hidden; the difference here is that he is manifest, that the nature is conscious of the divine Presence as the Lord, the Inhabitant, and it is - not by his secret will from above, “the will of the Father which is in heaven,” but by his quite direct and apparent will that he moves the nature. And here there seems to be no room for the human intermediary ; for it is by resort to his own nature, prakritim svdm, and not the special nature of the Jiva that the L:ord of all existence thus takes upon himself the human birth.
This doctrine is a hard saying, a difficult thing for the human reason to accept ; and for an obvious reason, because of the evident humanity of the Avatar. The Avatar is always a dual phenomenon of divinity and humanity ; the Divine takes upon himself the human nature with all its outward limitations and makes them the circumstances, means, instruments of the divine consciousness and the divine power, a vessel of
