Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)

And yet this liberation does not at all prevent him from acting. Only, he knows that it is not he who is active, but the modes, the qualities of Nature, her^ triple gunas. “The man who knows the principles of things thinks, his mind in Yoga (with the inactive Impersonal), ‘I am doing nothing' ; when he sees, hears, tastes, smells, eats, moves, sleeps, breathes, speaks, takes, ejects, opens his eyes or closes them, he holds that it is only the senses acting upon the objects of the senses." He himself, safe in the immutable, unmodified soul, is beyond the grip of the three gunas, trigundtita ; he is neither sattwic, rajasic nor tamasic ; he sees with a clear untroubled spirit the alternations of the natural modes and qualities in his action, their rhythmic play of light and happiness, activity and force, rest and inertia. This superiority of the calm soul observing its action but not involved in it, this traigundtitya, is also a high sign of the divine worker. By itself the idea might lead to a doctrine of the mechanical determinism of Nature and the perfect aloofness and irresponsibility of the soul ; but the Gita effectively avoids this fault of an insufficient thought by its illumining supertheistic idea of the Purushottama. It makes it clear that it is not in the end Nature which mechanically determines its own action ; it is the will of the Supreme which inspires her ; he who has already slain the Dhritarashtrians, he of whom Arjuna is only the

R 273 human instrument, a universal Soul, a transcendent Godhead is the master of her labour. The reposing of works in the Impersonal is a means of getting rid of the personal egoism of the doer, but the end is to give up all our actions to that great Lord of all, sarva-bhuta-maheshwara. “With a consciousness identified with the Self, renouncing all thy actions into Me, mayi sarvdni karmdni sannyasyddhydtma- chetasd, freed from personal hopes and desires, from the thought of *V and ‘mine*, delivered from the fever of the soul, fighf,** work, do my will in the world. /*rhe Divine motives, inspires, determines the entire action ; the human soul impersonal in the Brahman is the pure and silent channel of his power ; that power in the Nature executes the divine movement. Such only are the works of the liberated soul, muktasya karma, for in nothing does he act from a personal inception ; such are the actions of the accomplished Karmayogin. They rise from a free spirit and disappear without modifying it, like waves that rise and disappear on the surface of conscious, immutable depths/ Gata-sangasya muk- tasya jndndvasthita-chetasah, yajndydcharatah karma samagram praviliyate.

Since knowledge, desirelessness, impersonality, equality^, the inner self-existent peace and bliss, ffeedom from or at least superiority to the tangled interlocking of the three modes of Nature are the signs of the liberated soul, they must accompany it in all its activities. They are the condition of that unalterable calm which this soul preserves in all the movement, all the shock, all the clash of forces which surround it in the world. That calm reflects the equable immutability of the Brahman in the midst of all mutations, and it belongs to the indivi- sible and impartial Oneness which is for ever immanent in all the multiplicities of the universe. For an equal and all-equalising spirit is that Oneness in the midst of the million differences and^ inequalities of the world ; and equality of the spirit is the sole real equality, for in all else in existence there can only be similarity, adjustment and balance ; but even in the greatest similarities of the world we find difference of inequality and difference of unlikeness and the adjusted balancings of the world can only come about by a poising of combined unequal weights. Hence the immense importance attached by