Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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old Kshatriya nature, or he may lea ve it and live the life of the Sannyasin, following his new quietistic impulse. Which of these things he does, becomes quite indifferent ; or rather the second is the better way, since it will discourage more quickly the impulses of Nature which still have a hold on his mind owing to past created tendency and, when his body has fallen from him, he will securely depart into the Infinite and Impersonal with no necessity of returning again to the trouble and madness of life in this transient and sorrowful world, anityam asukham imaffi lokam.
If this were so, the Gita would lose all its meaning ; for its first and central object would be defeated. But the Gita insists that the nature of the action does matter and that there is a positiyie sanction for continuance^ in works, ijpt only that one quite negative and mechanical reason, the objectless compulsion of Nature. There Js still, after the ego has been conquered, a divine L ord and enjoyer of the sacrifice, hhoktdram yajnatapasdm, and there is still an obj^t in the sacr ifice. The Imj^rsonal Brahman is not the very last word, not the utterly highest secret of our being ; for impersonal and personal, finite and infin ite turn out to be only two opposite, yet concomitant aspects of a divine Being unlimited by these distinctions who is both these things at once. QodJs an ever unmanifest Infinite ever self-impelled to manifest himself in the finite; he is the grm_ impersQl^ Person ^of whom _alL personalities are partia l THE LORD OF THE SACRIFICE appearances ; he is the Djvine who reveals himself in the human being, the Lord seat ed in the heart ^ man . Knowledge teaches us to see all beings in the one impersonal self, for so we are liberated from the separative ego-sense, and then through this delivering impersonality to see them in this God, dttnani aiho rnayi, “jn die Self an^ then in Me^ Our eg o, our limiting personalities st and in the \py of our recognising the Divine^ who is in all and in whom 7ll have their being ; for, subject to personality, we see only such fragmentary asfiects of Him as the finite appearances of things suffer us to seize. We have to arrive at him not through our lower personality, but through the high, infinite and impersonal part of our being, and that we find by becoming this self one in all in whose existence the whole world is comprised. This infinite containing, not excluding all finite appearances, this impersonal admitting, not rejecting all individualities and personalities, this immobile sustaining, pervading, containing, not standing apart from all the movement of Nature, is the clear mirror in which the Divine will reveal His being. Therefore it is to the Impersonal that we have first to attain ; through the cosmic deities, through the asp>ects of the finite alone the perfect knowledge of God cannot be totally obtained. But neither is the silent immobility of the impersonal Self, conceived as shut into itself and divorced from all that it sustains, contains and pervades, the whole all- revealing all-satisfying truth of the Divipe. To
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