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

Nature ; aesthetic knowledge, when we discover by it the beauty of the Divine ; knowledge of the world, when we see through it the way of the Lord with his creatures and use it for the service of the Divine in man. Even then they are only ||ids ; the real knowledge is that which is a secret to the mind, of which the mind only gets reflec^ns, but which Uves in the spirk.

^ ” ! The Gita in describing how we come by this knowledge, says that we get first initiation into it from the men of knowledge” who have seen, not those who know 'merely by the intell%|^, its essential truths ; but the actuality of it comes |Epm jyi Ain^o^niielves : ‘‘the man who is perfected by Yoga, finds it of himself, in the self by the course of Time,*' it, grows within him, that is to say, and he grows into it as he goes on increasing in desire- lessness, in equality, in devotion to the Divine, f It is only of the supreme knowledge that this can altogether be said ; the knowlec^e which the intellect of man amasses, is gathered laboriously by the senses and the reason from outsidel To get this other knowl edg e, self;existent, intuitive, self- experi^c ing, self-revealing, we must have conqu«*ed and controlled om mind and seffses, sdhydlendriyah, so that we are no longer subject to their deTusioW, but rather the mind and senses become its pure mirror ; we must have fixed our who^ conscious be ing on the truth of that supreme r^dity In which all exists, tat-pardh, so that it may dSptay in us its iummous^ldPexistence. EQUALITY AND KNOWLEDGE

Fiimlly, we must have a faith whkh no intellectual doubt can be allowed" to disturb, graddh^dn labhate ji^nam, “The ignorant who has not faith, the soul of doubt goeth to perdition ; neither ^is world, nor the supreme world, nor any happiness is for the soul full of doubts/* In fact, it is true that without faith nothing decisive can be achieved either in this world or for possession of the world above, and that it is only by l^ing hold of some sure basis and positive support that man can ‘attain any measure of terrestrial or celestTal succe§|^i^ satisfaction and happiness ; the merely sceptical rnirid Icwes itself in tfc~ void. But still in the lower knowledge doubt and scepticism have their temporary uses ; in the higher they are stumblingblocks : for there the whole secret is not the balancing of truth and error, but a constantly progressing realisation of revealed truth. \In intellectual, knowledge there is~“always'*a” mixture of Jalsehood^or incompleteness which has^o be rid of by subjecting the . truth itself' to sceptical inquiry ; but in tl^ high^ knowledge falsehood cannot enter and that which intdlecf "contribute" by attaching itself to this or that opinion, cannot be got rid of by mere questioning, but will <fall away of itself by persiste nce in realisa tion. What- evCT^"^ incompleteness there is in the knowledge attained, it mustT)e got rid not by questioning in its roots what has already been realised, but |W[qceeding to further and more complete realimion through a deeper, higher and wider living in the