Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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all-pervading, it is for ever and for ever. Not manifested like the body, but greater than all manifestation, not to be analysed by"the Siought, but greater than all mind, not capable of change and modification like the life and its organs and their objects, but bej^ond the changes of ^imn d an d life _and_ body, it is yet the Reality which aU these strive toJfigu^.
Even if the truth of our being were a thing less sublime, vast, intangible by death and life, if the self were constantly subject to birth and death,^ still the death of beings ought not to be a cause of sorrow. For that is an inevita ble circumstance of the souFs. ^eU-manifesm^ Its birth is an appearing out of sonie state in which it is not non- existent T)ut unmanifest to our mortal senses, its d^ath is a retur n to t hat, unmanifest world or condition and out of it it will again appear in the physical manifestation. The to-do made by the physical mind and senses about death and the horror of death whether on the sickbed or the battlefield, is the most ignorant of nervous clamours. Our sorrow for the death of men is an ignorant grieving for those for whom there is no cause to grieve, since they have neither gone out of existence nor suffered any painful or terrible change of condition, but are beyond death no less in being and no more unhappy in circumstance than in life. But in reality the higher truth is the real truth. All a re that Self, th^^One, tha^^Divine^ whom we look on and speak and hear of as the wonderful beyond our comprehension, for after all our seeking and declaring of knowledge and learning from those who have knowledge no human mind has ever known this Absolute. It is this which is here veiled by the world, the master of the body ; all life is only its shadow ; the com ing of „ the soul Jnto jphysical mafTffestation and our pass^ing out of it by deatH Is only one of its minor movements. When we have known ourselves as this, then to^speak of ourselves as slayer or slain is an absurdity. One thing only is the truth in which we have to live, the Eternal manifesting itself_^s the soul of man in the great of its pilgrimage with birth and death for milestor^s, with wealds beyond as resting-places, with alfthe ^curastances of life happy or unhappy as the means of our progress and battle and victory and with immortality as the home to which the soul travels.
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