the thirst for life. Dhritarashtra, the outer man, is blind because the body without the awakened soul faculties within is merely senseless matter, and thus is incapacitated for governing, and some other person is represented in the Mahabharata as being the governor of the state, the nominal king being the body—Dhritarashtra.

“As all our students know that there is a double line of evolution going on within us, we find that the Kurus spoke of in the poem represent the more material side of those two lines, and the Pandava princes, of whom Arjuna is one, stand for the spiritual side of the stream—that is, Arjuna represents the immortal Spirit.

“Krishna was intended to represent the Logos, or Christ Self; and Arjuna, was intended to represent the human mind. The alleged celestial origin for the two branches of the family, the Kurus and Pandavas, is in perfect consonance with this; for the body, or Dhritarashtra, being solely material and the lower plane in which the development takes place, the Kurus and Pandavas are our inheritance from the Celestial Beings, the Sons of God, referred to in Genesis; the one tending towards materiality, the other being spiritual.

“The Kurus, then, the lower portion of our nature earliest developed, obtain the power on this plane for the time being, and one of them, Duryodhana, ‘prevails,’ so that the Pandavas, or the more spiritual parts of our nature, are banished temporarily from the country, that is, from governing man. The long wanderings and varied hardships of the Pandavas are wanderings caused by the necessities of evolution before these better parts are able to make a stand for the purpose of gaining the control in man’s evolutionary struggle. This also has reference to the cyclic rise and fall of nations and the race.

“The hostile armies, then, who meet on the plain of the Kurus are these two collections of the human faculties and powers, those on one side tending to drag us down, those on the other aspiring towards spiritual illumination. The battle refers not only to the great warfare that mankind as a whole carries on, but also to the struggle which is inevitable as soon as any unit in the human family resolves to allow his higher nature to govern him in his life.

“Hence, we see that Arjuna, represents not only man as a race, but also any individual who resolves upon the task of developing his better nature. What is described as happening in the poem to