Without pride or delusion

From Mircea Eliade's "Images and Symbols"

"Indra thus receives a second revelation : he now understands that everyone ought to take his own path to the fulfilment of his vocation, which means, in the last reckoning, doing his duty. And, since Indra’s vocation and his duty were to continue to be Indra, he resumes his identity and carries on his heroic adventures, but without pride or delusion now that he understands the vanity of all “situations”, even that of a King of Gods . . .

What is essential is not always to forsake one’s historical situation and strive in vain to rejoin the universal Being—it is to keep steadily in mind the perspectives of Great Time, while continuing to fulfil one’s duty in historical time. This is precisely the lesson given by Krishna to Arjuna, in the Bhagavad-Gita. In India, as elsewhere in the archaic world, the access to Great Time obtained by the periodic recitation of the myths, permits the indefinite continuance of a certain order, which is at once metaphysical, social and ethical. This order does not encourage an idolisation of History, for the perspective of mythical time renders any portion of historic time illusory.

As we have just seen, the myth of cyclic and endless Time, destroying as it does the illusions woven by the minor rhythms of time (that is, by historical time) reveals to us the precariousness and the ontological unreality of the Universe, and, at the same time, it points to the way of deliverance. Indeed, one can be saved from the bonds of Maya either by the contemplative way, renouncing the world, practising asceticism and the mystical techniques conducive thereto, or by the way of action, remaining in the world, but no longer enjoying the “fruits of one’s actions” (phalatrisnavairdgya). In either case, the essential thing is not to believe in the reality exclusively of the forms that are born and bloom in Time: we must never forget that such forms are “true”only in their own frame of reference and that, ontologically, they are devoid of substance. As we have said. Time can become an instrument of knowledge, in the sense that it is enough to project a thing or a being upon the plane of cosmic Time to become immediately aware of its unreality. The gnoseological and soteriological function of such a change of perspective, obtained by reference to the major rhythms of time, is admirably illustrated by certain myths about the Maya of Vishnu."