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

Ask it to rise out of all this disturbance to the unmingled joy of the pure bliss-soul which all the time secretly supports its strength in the struggle and makes its own continued existence possible, — it will draw back at once from the call. It does not believe in such an existence ; or it believes that it would not be life, that it would not be at all the varied existence in the world around it in which it is accustomed to take pleasure ; it would be some- thing tasteless and without savour. Or it f^els that the effort would be too difficult for it ; it recoils from the struggle of the ascent, although in reality the spiritual change is not at all more difficult than 2the realisation of the dreams the desire-soul pursues, nor entails more struggle and labour in the attain- ment than the tremendous effort which the desire- soul expends in its passionate chase after its own "transient objects of pleasure and desire. The true cause of its unwillingness is that it is asked to rise above its own atmosphere and breathe a rarer and purer air of life, whose bliss and power it cannot realise and hardly even conceives as real, while the joy of this lower turbid nature is to it the one thing familiar and palpable. Nor is this lower satisfac- tion in itself a thing evil and unprofitable ; it is rather the condition for the upward evolution of our human nature out of the tamasic ignorance and inertia to which its material being is most subject ; it is the rajasic stage of the graded ascent of man towards the supreme self-knowledge, power and bliss. But if we rest eternally on this plane, the madhyamd gatih of the Gita, our ascent remains unfinished, the evolution of the soul incomplete. Through the sattwic being and nature to that which is beyond the three gunas lies the way of the soul to its perfection.