Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/170

162 not use life and works for the enlargement and elevation of his being through sacrifice, he lives in vain.

Only when the individual being begins to perceive and acknowledge in his acts the value of the self in others as well as the power and needs of his own ego, begins to perceive universal Nature behind his own workings 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. He begins to discover a law other than that of his desires, to which his desires must be more and more subordinated and subjected; he develops the purely egoistic into the understanding and ethical being. He begins to give more value to the claims of the self in others and less to the claims of his ego ; he admits the strifé between egoism and altruism and by the increase of his altruistic tendencies he pre- pares the enlargement of his own consciousness and being. He beginsto perceive Nature and divine Powers in Nature to whom he owes sacrifice, adoration, obedi- ence, because it is by them and by their law that the workings both of the méntal and the material world are controlled, and he learns that only by increasing their presence and their greatness in his thought and will and life can he himseclf increase his powers, knowledge, right action and the satisfactions which these things bring to him. Thus he adds the religious and supraphysical to the material and egoistic sense of life and prepares himself torise through the finite to the Infinite.

But this is only a lohg intermediate stage. Itis still subject to the law of desire, to the centrality of all