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

The whole question and the whole method lie then in the liberation of the soul from the limita- tions of our present natural being. In our natural life the first dominating fact is our subjection^ to the forms of material Nature, the outward touches of things. These present themselves to our life through the senses, and the life through the senses immediately returns upon these objects 2to seize upon them and deal with them, desires, attaches itself, seeks for results. The mind in all its ini^r sensations, reactions, emotiom, habitual ways of perceivings thinking and feelii^ obeys this action of the senses ; the jeason too carried away by the mind gives itself up to this life of the senses, this life in which the inner being is subject to the externality of things and cannot for a moment really get above it or outside the circle of its action upon us and its psychological results and reactions within us. It cannot get beyond them because there is the principle of ego by which the reason differentiates the sum of the action of Nature upon our mind, will, sense, body from her action in other minds, wills, nervous organisms, bodies ; and life to us means only the way she affects our ego and the way our ego replies to her touches. We know nothing else, we seem to be nothing else ; the soul^ itself seems then onlj a separate^ mass of mind, will, emotional and nervous reception and reaction. We may enlarge our ego, identify ourselves with the family, clan, class, country, nation, humanity even, but still the ego remains in all these disguises the root of our actions, only it finds a larger satisfaction of its separate being by these wider dealings with external things.