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

But is this a going in into some deep sleep of samadhi away from all world-consciousness, or is it the preparatory movement for a dissolution of the natural being and the individual soul into some absolute Self who is utterly and for ever beyond Nature and her works, laya, moksha f Is that with- drawal necessary before we can enter into Nirvana, or is Nirvana, as the context seems to suggest, a state which can exist simultaneously with world- consciousness and even in its own way include it? Apparently the latter, for in the succeeding verse the^ij^ goes on to say, “Sages wiu NirYanai.in the Brahn^n. they in whom the stains of sin are effaced andTthe Knot of doubt is cut asunder, masters of their selves, who are occupied in doing goodJn all crtztures. j^a -bhuta-hite ratdh/' That would almost seem to mean that to be^ mus is to be in Nirvana. But the next verse is quite clear and decisive, **Yatis (those who practise self-mastery by Yoga and austerity) who are delivered from desire and wrath and have gained self-mastery, for them NliVana In the Brahman exists all about them, encompasses them, they already live in it because they have knowledge of the Self." That is to say, to have knowledge and possession of the self is to exist in Nirvana. This is clearly a large extension of the idea of Nirvana. Freedom Eom all stain of the passions, the self-mastery of the equal mind on which that freedom is founded, equality to all beings, sajvahhuteshu, and beneficial love for all,

NIRVANA AND WORKS IN THE WORLD final des truction of that doubt and obscurity of the i gno rance which keeps us divided from the all- unifying Divine and the knowledge of the One Self widhin us and in all_are evidently the conditions of Nirvana which are laid down in these verses of the Gita, go to constitute it and are its spiritual substance.

Thu s Ni rvana is clearly compatible with world- consciousness and with action in the world. For the sages who possess it are conscious of and in intimate relation by works with the Divine in the mutable universe ; they are occupied with the good of all creatures, sarvabhuta-hite. They have not renounced the experiences of the Kshara Purusha, they have divinised them ; for the Kshara, the Gita tells us, is all existences, sarvahhutdni, and the doing universal good to all is a divine action in the mutability of Nature. This action in the world is not inconsistent with living in Brahman, it is rather its inevitable condition and outward result because the Brahman in whom we find Nirvana, the spiritual consciousness in which we lose the separative ego-consciousness, is not only within us but within all these existences, exists not only above and apart from all these universal happenings^ but pervades them, contains them and is extended in them. Therefore by Nirvana in the Brahman must be meant a destruction or extinction of the limited separative consciousness, falsifying and dividing, which is brought into being on the surface of existence by the lower Maya of the three gunas, and