Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/138

130 how does such a man speak, how sit, how walk? No such signs can be given, nor does the Teacher attempt to supply them ; for the only possible test of its possession is inward and that there are plenty of hostile psycho- logical forces to apply. Equality is the great stamp of the liberated soul and of that equality even the most discernible signs are still subjective. “A man with mind untroubled by sorrows, who has done with desire for pleasures, from whom liking and wrath and fear have passed away, such is the sage whose understanding has become founded in stability.”” He is “without the triple action of the qualities of Prakriti, without the dualities, ever based in his true being, without getting or having, -possessed of his self.” For what gettings and havings has the free soul ? Once we are possessed of the Self, we arc in possession of all things.

And yet he does not cease from work and action. There is the originality and power of the Gita, that having affirmed this static condition, this superiority - to nature, this emptiness cven of all that constitutes ordinarily the action of Nature for the liberated soul, it is still able to vindicate for it, to enjoin on it even the continuance of works and thus avoid the great defect of the merely quietistic and ascetic philosophies,—the defect from which we find them today attempting. to escape. “Thoun hast a right to action, but only to action, never to its fruits; let not the fruits of thy works be thy motive, neitherlet there be in thee any attachment to inactivity.,” Therefore it is not the works practised with desire by the Veda-vadins, it is not the claim for the satisfaction of the restless and energetic mind by a constant activity, the claim