Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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impersonal drive of conscious power directed towards an aim not his own, — subtly regulated in its energy and direction by the divine wisdom. The result may be success, as the ordinary mind understands it, or it may seem to that mind to be defeat and failure ; but to him it is always the success intended, not by him, but by the all-wise manipulator of action and result, because he does not seek for victory, but only for the fulfilment of the divine will and wisdoiri^ which works out its ends through apparent failure as well as and often with greater force than through < apparent triumph. ?Vrjuna, bidden to fight, is assured of victory ; but even if certain defeat were before him, he must still fight because that is the present work assigned to him as his immediate share in the great sum of energies by which the divine will is surely accomplished]
/^he liberated man has no personal hopes ; he does not seize on things as his personal possessions ; he receives what the divine Will brings him, covets nothing, is jealous of none: what comes to him he takes without repulsion and without attachment ; what goes from him he allows to depart! into the whirl of things without repining or grief or sense of loss, (ilis heart and self are under perfect control ; they are free from reaction and passion, they make no turbulent response to the touches of outward things. His action is indeed a purely physical action, gdrtram kevalam karma ; for all else comes from above, is not generated on the human 26^ THE DIVINE WORKER plane, is only a reflection of the will, knowledge, joy of the divine PurushottamaA Therefore he does not by a stress on doing and its objects bring about in his mind and heart any of those reactions which we call passion and sin. Foifsin consists not at all in the outward deed, but in an impure reaction of the personal will, mind and heartl which accompanies it or causes it ; the impersonal, the spiritual is always pure, apdpaviddham, and gives to all that it does its own inalienable purity. This spiritual impersonality is a third sign of the divine worker. All human souls, indeed, who have attained to a certain greatness and largeness are conscious of an impersonal Force or Love or Will and Knowledge working through them, but they are not free from egoistic reactions, sometimes violent enough, of their human personality. But this freedom the liberated soul has attained ; for he has cast his personality into the impersonal, where it is no longer his, but is taken up by the divine Person, the Purushottama, who uses all finite qualities infinitely and freely and is bound by none. He has become a soul and ceased to be a sum of natural qualities ; and such appearance of personality as remain for the operations of Nature, is something unbound, lai^e, flexible, universal ,* it is a free mould for the Infinite, it is a living mask of the Purushottama.
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