Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/171

Rh things in the conceptions and needs of his ego and to the control of his being as well as his works by Nature, though it is a regulated and governed desire, a clarified ego and a Nature more and more subtilised and enlight- ened by the sattwic, the highest natural principle. All this is still within the domain, though the very much enlarged domain, of the mutable, finite and personal. The real self-knowledge and consequently the right way of works lies beyond ; for the sacrifice done with know- ledge is the highest sacrifice and that alone brings a perfect working. That can only come when he perceives that the self in him and the self in others are one being ~and this self is something higher than the ego, an in- finite, an impersonal, a universal existence in whom all move and have their being,— when he perceives that all the cosmic gods to whom he offers his sacrifice are forms of one infinite Godhead and when again, leaving all his linfed and limiting conceptions of that one: Godhead, he perceives him to be the supreme and in- effable Deify who is at once the finite and the infinite, the one self and the many, beyond Nature though manifesting himsell through Nature, beyond limitation by qualities though formulating the power of his being through infinite quality. This is the Purushottama to whom the sacrifice has to be offered, not for any transient personal fruit of works, but for the soul’s pos- session of God and in order to live in harmony4and union with the Divine.

In other words, man’s way to liberation and perfec- tion lies through an increasing impersonality. It is his ancient and constant experience that the more he opens himself to the impersonal and infinite, tp that