Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/160

152 age of works. "He who is satisfied with whatever gain comes to him and equal in failure and success, is not bound even when he acts. When a man liberated, free from attachment, acts for sacrifice, all his action is dis- solved,” leaves that is to say, no result of bondage or after-impression on his free, pure, perfect and equal soul. To these passages we shall have to return. They are followed by a perfectly explicit and detailed interpretation of the meaning of yajna in the language of the Gita which leaves no doubt at all abousthe symbolic use of the words and the psychological character of the sacrifice enjoined by this teaching. In the ancient Vedic system there was always a double sense physical and psychological, outward and symbolic, the exterior form of the sacrifice and the inner meaning of all its circum- stances. But the secret symbolism of the ancient Vedic mystics, exact, curious, poetic, psychological, had been long forgotten by this time and it is now re- placed by another, large, general and philosophical .in the spirit of Vedanta and a later Yoga. The fire of sacrifice, agni, is no material flame, but brakmdgni, the fire of the Brahman, or it is the Brahman-ward energy, inner Agni, priest of the sacrifice, into which the offering is poured; the fire is self-control orit is a purified sense-action or it is the vital energy in that discipline of the control of the vital being through the control of the breath which is common to Rajayoga and Hatha- yoga, or it is the fire of self-knowledge, the flame of the supreme sacrifice. The food caten as the leavings of the sacrifice is, it is explained, the nectar of immortality, amvita, left over from the offering; and here we have still something of the old Vedic symbolism in which the Soma-wine was the physical symbol of the amrila, the immortalising delight of the divine ecstasy won