Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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Tecover his freedom except by dissociat ion from her and by cessatlbn'^of fier Stivities! IF tTierPa^an casts from him the idea of himself as the doer or of the works as his, if, as the Gita enjoins, he fixes himself in the view of himself as the inactive noh-doer, dtmdnam akartdram, and all . action as not his own but Nature’s, as the play of her gunas, will not a like result follow? The Sankhya Purusha is the giv^r of -th e sanrf inn, but a pa mye sanction onl y, anumati , the work is entirely Matute’s ; essentially he is the witness and sustainer, not the governing and active consciousness of the universal Godhead. He is the Soul that sees and accepts, as a spectator accepts the representation of a play he is watching, not the Soul that both governs and watches the play planned by himself and staged in his own being. If then he withdraws the sanction, if he refuses to acknowledge the illusion of doing by which the play continues, he ceases also to be the sustainer and the action comes to a stop, since it is only for the pleasure of the witnessing conscious Soul that Nature performs it and only by his support that she can maintain it. Therefore it is evident that the Gita’s concepti on of the relations b f the Purusha and Prakriti are not the Sankhya’s, s ince the‘ same movement leads quite ditterent result, in one case to c essaticm of works , in the other to a great, a selfless and desireless, a divine action. In the Sankhya Soul and Natur e a re two different entitie s, in the Gita they are two aspects, two powers of one self-existent being ; tne Soul is not only giver of the s anction , but lord of Nature. Is hwara, through her enjoying the *"play of the ^orld'* th^^ exegitirig divine will and knowledge in a scheme of things supported byhis sanction“*and existing by his immanent presence, existing in his being, governed by the law o£ his being and by the conscious will within it. To kno w, to respond t o, t< ^live i n the divine being and n^ure this Soul I S, the object ofwithdrawing fro m the ego an^ its action.' One rises then above the lower nature of the gunas to the higher divine nature.
The movement by which this ascension is determined results from the complex poise of the Soul in its relations with Nature ; it depends on the Gita’s idea of the triple Purusha. The 1^1 t hat immediately inform s the action, the mutations, the successive becomings oF Nature, i s the Ksha ra, that which seems to change with her changes, to move in her motion, the Person who follows in his idea of his being the""c nanges ol liis p ersonality br ought about by the continuous action of her Karm a. Nature here is Kshara, a constant movement and mutation in *Time, a const ant becorning . But this Nature is simply the executive pow^ of the Soul itself ; for only by what he is, can she become, only according to the possibilities of his becoming, can she act ; she works out the becoming of his being. Hgr Karm a is dete rmined by Swabhav a, the own-nature, the law of se lf- bfrripinp^ eveiTthbugh, because it is the agent and executive of the becoming, the action BEYOND THE MODES OF NATURE
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