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

When we can live^ in the hi gher Self bj the u nity of work s a nd self-knowTeclge, become superior to the method of the lower workings of Prakriti. We are n o longer enslaved to Natu re and jier g unas, but, one ^wTth~^e Ish^ra . tTie mast^ of our nature, we are abfe to use her without subjection to the chain of Karma, for the purposes of the Divine WiU. in us ; for tliaT is what the greater Self in us is, he is the Lord of her works and unaffected by the troubled stress of her reactions. The soul ignorant in Nature, on the contrary, is enslaved by that ignorance to her modes, because it is identified there, not felicitously with its true self, not with the Divine who is seated above her, but stupidly and unhappily with the ego- mind which is a subordinate factor in her operations in spite of the exaggerated figure it makes, a mere mental knot and point of reference for the play of the natural workings. To break this knot, no longer to make the ego the centre and beneficiary of our works, but to derive all from and refer all to th e ne S upersoul i s the w;ay to becom e s uperiorto all the restless ^ouBIe^f IvJature^ modes. Foritis to live in the supreme consciousness. THE DETERMINISM OF NATURE 2of which the ego-mind is a degradation, and to act i n an equ al ^d unified Will and Force and noT in the unequal play of the gunas which is a broken seeking and striving, a disturbance, an inferior Maya. The passages in which the Gita lays stress on the subjec tion of the e go-soul to Nature, have by some Been under ^od as the^nunciatioh of an absolute and a mechanical^ determinism which leaves no room for^ any freedom within the cosmic existence. Certainly, the language it uses is emphatic and seems very absolute. But we must take, here as elsewhere, the thought of the Gita as a whole and not force its affirmations in their solitary sense quite detached from each other, — as indeed every truth, however true in itself, yet, taken apart from others which at once limit and complete it, becomes a snare to bind the intellect and a misleading dogma ; for in reality e ach is one thread of a complex weft and no t hread m u st be taken apart from me we ft, ii very- thin^ in tHe Gita is even ^ inteiwoven and must be understood in its relation to the whole. The Gita itself makes a distinction between those w ho have not th^J^Qwle dge of the wi g gle, akr'itsnavidah, and are misled by the partial truths of e^Sstence, 3the Yfigin wh o has the synthe tic knnvy ledg e of the totality, krHtsna;;vit, To see all existence steadily ana see iTwhole and not be misled by its conflicting truths, is the first necessity for the calm and complete wisdom to which the Yogin is called upou^ to rise. A certain absolute freedom is one aspect of the soul’s relations with Nature at one pole of our complex being ; a certain abs olute determinism by Nature is the opposite aspect at Its op^site pole ; and there is also a partial and apparent, therefore an unreal eidolon of liberty which the soul receives by a contorted reflection of these two opposite truths in the developing menta- lity. It is the latter to which we ordinarily give, more or less inaccurately, the name of free will ; the Gita regards nothing as freedo m which is not^^ complete liberation and master y.