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

between a relative good and evil, the fear of sin and the difficult endeavour towards virtue? But the liberated who has united h is reason and will with tEe~E)ivme, casts away from him even here in this world of d ualiti es both good d oing and ev il doing ; for he rises to a higher law beyond good and evil, founded in the liberty of self-knowledge. Such desireless action can have no decisiveness, no effectiveness, no efficient motive, no large or vigorous creative power? Not so ; action done in Yoga is not only the highest but the wisest, the most potent and efficient even for the affairs of the world ; for it_is Jnformed by the knowledge an d will o f the Master of works ; ‘'Yoga is skill in works. ” But aTI^ction directed towafdTTife leads away from the universal aim of the Yogin which is by common consent to escape from bondage to this distressed and sorrowful human birth? Not so, either ; the sages who do works without desire for fruits and in Yoga with the D ivine are liberated from the bondage of birth and reach that other perfect status in which there are none of the maladies which afflict the mind and life of a suffering humanity.

The status h e reac hes is the Brahmic c ondition ; he gets to firm standing in the Brahman, br^hnjX is a reversal of the whole view, experience, knowledge, values, seeings of earth-bound creatures. This life of the dualities which is to them their day, their waking, their consciousness, their bright condition of activity and knowledge, is to him a night, a troubled sleep and darkness of the soul ;

that higher being which is to them a night, a sleep in which all knowledge and will cease, is to the self- mastering sage his waking, his luminous day of true being, knowledge and power. They are troubled and muddy waters disturbed by every little inrush of desire ; he is an ocean of wide being and cortscioiiâness^ which is ever being filled, yet ever motionless in its large poise of his soul ; all the desires of the world enter into him as waters into the sea, yet he has no desire nor is troubled. For while they are filled with the troubling sense of ego and mine and thine, he is one with the one Self in all and has no 'T* or “mine''. He acts as others, but he has abandoned all desires and their Idhgifi^ Fie attains to the great peace and is not bewildered by the shows of things ; he has extinguished his individual ego in the jOn^ lives in that'ttnit^Tahd, fixed in thar status at fiis end, can attain to extinction in the Brahman, Nirvana, — not the negative self-annihilation of the Buddhists, but the great immeigence of the .separate personal-JSgljLlnto the vasTTeality of the one infinite imperson^ Existence. 5ucBr'*‘ subtly unifying Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta, is the first foundation of the teaching of the Gita. It is far from being all, but it is the first indispensable practical unity of_knowledge and wori^irili^a ^hiTd'^owning