Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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the rajasic nature and from the passion and the struggle of the rajasic nature to the greater light, happiness and purity of the sattwic nature. The relative self-maste j^ gained by the natural man over himself is l^inion achieved by the higher po ssibilities of his nature over its lower possibiliti es. ^nd^Ehis is done in mm when he associates his idea of self with the struggle of the higher guna to get the mastery, the predominance over the lower guna. The sense of free will, illusion or not, is a necessary machinery of the action of Nature, necessary for man during his progress, and it would be disastrous for him to lose it before he is ready for a higher truth. If it be said, as it has been said, that Natu re deludes man to fulfil her behests and that the jdea of a fre e individual will is the most powerful of these delusio^ then it must alsoTbe said that the clelusion is lor his .good and without it he could not rise to his full possibilities.
But it is not a sheer delusion, it is only an error of standpoint and an error of placement. The ego thinks that it is the real self and acts as if it were the true Centre of a c tion altd as it all ^sted for its sa£e, and therelt ^minits an prmr ^f standpoint a nd placement. It is not wrong in thinking that there is somefEing or someone within ourselves, within this action of our nature, who is the true centre of its action and for whom all exists ; but this is not the ego, it is the Lord secret within our hearts, th e divine ihirush a, and the Tiva, other than egop wfao is a j^rtion of his being. 1 he s^t-assertion oF ego- BEYOND THE MODES OF NATURE sense is the broken and distorted shadow in our minds of the truth that there is a real Self within us which is the master of all and for whom and at whose behest Nature goes about her works. So too the ego’s idea of free will is a distorted and misplaced sense of the truth that t here is a free Self within us and that the will in Nature is only a moditied and partial reflection of its will, modified and partial because it lives in the successive moments of Time and acts by a constant series of modifications which forget much of their own precedents and are only imperfectly conscious of their own consequences and aims. But the Will within^ exceeding the moments of Time, knows all these, and the action of Nature in us is an attempt, we might say, to work out under the difficult conditions of a natural and egoistic ignorance what is foreseen in full supramental light by the inner Will and Knowledge . But a time mu st come in our progress when we are op en our ey es to the real truth oi_our
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