Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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the sign that the world is of God_and belongs to God and that life is his dominion and house of worship and not a field for the sell-satisfaction of the independent ego ; not the fulfilment of the ego, — that is only our crude and obscure beginning, but the discovery of God, the worship and seeking of the Divine and the Infinite through a constantly enlarging sacrifice culminating in a perfect self- giving founded on a perfect self-knowledge is that to which the experience of life is at last intended to lead. But the fiuiiyidualjbjdiig begins with ignorance and persists long in ignorance. Acutely conscious of himself he^sees^ the ego^^asL the cause and. whole me aning of ^Ijfe and not the piyine. He sees himself as . the doer of works and does not .see th^ inc luding his o wn m^nal and externaL-actiyiuesi.areJjie..wm,to of dn^ universal and nothing else. He sees hfmself as the enioyer of works and imagines that THE LORD OF THE SACRIFICE for him all exists and him Nature ought to satisfy and obey his personal will ; he does not see that she is not at all concerned with satisfying him or at all careful of his will, but obeys a higher universal will and seeks to satisfy a Godhead who transcends her and her works and creations ; his finite being , his will and his sati sfactions ^r e hers and not his^ ^d s he olBEers them at e very mo ment as a sa crifice toj^ Divine of_ whose jmrpose in her . she makes all this the coveronstr umentat ioiL, Because of this ignorance whose seal is egoism, the creature ignores the law of sacrifice and seeks to take all he can for himself and gives only what Nature by her internal and external compulsion forces him to give. He can really take nothing except what she allows him to receive as his portion, what the divine Powers within her yield to his desire. The egoistic soul in a world of sacrifice is^s_if„a thief or rpbber_whp takes what these Powers bring to him^and has no mind to give in return. He misses the true meaning of life and, since he does not use^ fife and works for the enlargement_and _ elevation pf_, his teing through sacrifice, he lives i n v ain.
Only when the individual being begins to perceive and acknowledge in his acts the value of the self ^j3thgrs asjiyell ^ the power and needs of his o wn ego, begins to perceive universal Nature behind his own workin gs and through the cosmic godheads gets some glimpse of the One and the Infinite, is he on his way to the transcendence of his limitation by the ego and the discovery of his soul. JHe begins to discover^a la^ other ^than^that gi his ^sires, to which his desires must be more and more subordinated and subjected ; he dev elops the purely egoistic into jthe understanding and j^hical being. He begins to^give morejyali^ jp the claims of the self in others and less to the claims of his ego ; he admits the st rife be tween
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