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

But when one has got to the top? Then works are no longer the cause ; the calm of self-mastery aild self-possession gained by works becomes the cause. Again, the cause of what? Of fixity in the Self, in the Brahman-consciousness and of the perfect equality in which the divine works of the liberated man are done. “For when one does not get w 2attached to the objects of sense or to works and has renounced all will of desire in the mind, then is he said to have ascended to the top of Yoga.” That, as we know already, is the spirit in which the liberated man does works ; he does them without desire and attachment, without the egoistic personal will and the mental seeking which is the parent of desire. He has conquered his lower self, reached the perfect calm in which his highest self is manifest to him, that highest self always concentrated in its own being, samdhita, in Samadhi, not only in the trance of the inward-drawn consciousness, but always, in the waking state of the mind as well, in exposure to the causes of desire and of the disturbance of calm, to grief and pleasure, heat and cold, honour and disgrace, all the dualities, gitoshna-sukhaduhkheshu tathd mdndpamdnayoh. This higher self is the Akshara, kutastha, which stands above the changes and the perturbations of the natural being ; and the Yogin is said to be in Yoga with it when he also is like it, kutastha, when he is superior to all appearances and mutations, when he is satisfied with self-knowledge, when he is equal-minded to all things and happenings and persons.