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

his jown subjectivi0, the less he is bound by his ego and by the circle of the finite, the more he feels a sense of largeness, peace, pure happiness. The pleasure, joy, satisfaction which the finite by itself can give or the ego in its own right attain, is transitory, petty and insecure. To dwell entirely in the ego-sense and its finite conceptions, powers, satisfactions is to find this world for ever full of transience and suffering, anityam asukham ; the finite life is always troubled by a certain sense of vanity for this fundamental reason that the_Jinite is not the whole or the highest truth of life ; life is not entirely real until it opens into the sense of the infinite. It is for this reason that the Giiaj 3 ipens its gospel of works by insisting on, the Brahmic ^nsciousness^ the impersonal life^ that great object of the discipline of the ancient sages. For the impersonal, the infinite, the One in which all the permanent, mutable, multiple activity of the world finds above itself its base of permanence, security and peace, is the immobile Self,, the Akshara, the B^rahman.. M we see this, we shall see that to jais^ one's consciousness and the poise of one's being out of limited personality imo this infinite^ impersonal Brahman is the fir st spiritual necessi,ty . To ^^ all beings in this one Self is the knowledge which raises the soul out of egoistic ignorance and its works and results ; to live in it is to acquire peace and firm spiritual foundation.

The \^y to bring about this great transforma- tion follows a double pa A ; for there is the jyay i88 THE LORD OF THE SACRIFICE

PJL knowledge and there is the of works, and the pita c ombines them in a Jirm synthesis. The way of knpwkdge is .to _ turn the undersunding, tj^e . intelligent _will . away from its downward abso rption the workings of the mind and the semes and upward to t he self, the_ Purusha or Brahman ; it is to make it dwell always on the one idea of the one Self and not in the many-branching conceptions of the mind and many-streaming impulses of desire. Taken by itself th is pa th would seem t o lead to the complete renunciation of works, to an immobile passivity and to the severance of the soul from Nature. But in reality such an aybsQlute r^unciation, passivity and severance .are impossible. "Purusha and Prakriti are twin principles of Jbeinjg which cannot be severed, and so lon g as we remain in Natmre, our workings in Nature must continue, even though they may take a^different form or rather a different sense from those of the unenlightened soul. The jn^ renunciation — for enunc iation, san nydsa, there must be — is not the fleeing from works, bjaLJhe slay ing o f ego and des ire. The way is to abandon attachment to the fruit of works even while doing them, and the way is to r ecog nise Nature as_the agent and lea^e to do her works and t o live i^he soul as the wit ness an d sustainer, watching and sustaining her, but not attached either to her actions or their fruits. The ego, the limited and troubled personality is then quieted and merged in the consciousness of the one impersonal Self^