Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/172

164 which is pure and high and one and common in all things and beings, the impersonal and infinite in Nature, the impersonal and infinite in life, the impersonal and infinite in his own subjectivity, the less he is bound by - his ego and by the circle of the finite, the more he feels a sense of largeness, peace, pure happiness. The pleasure, joy, satisfaction which the finite by itself can give or the ego in its own right attain, is transitory, petty and insecure. To dwell entirely in the ego-sense and its finite conceptions, powers, satisfactions is to find this world for ever full of transience and suffering, anityam asukham; the finite life is always troubled by a certain sense of vanity for this fundamental reason that the finite is not thé whole or the highest truth of. life; life is not entirely real until it opens into the sense of the infinite. It is for this reason that the Gita opens its gospel of works by insisting on the Brahmic conscious- ness, the impersonal life, that great object @ the disci- pline of the ancient sages. For the impersonal, the infinite, the One in which all the ‘permanent, mutable, multiple activity of the world finds above jtself its base of permanence, security and peace, is the immobile Self, the Akshara, the Brahman. If we see this, wg shall see that to raise one’s consciousness and the poise of one'’s being out of limited personality into this infinite and impersonal Brahman is the first spiritual necessity. To wee all beings in this one Self is the knowledge which raises the soul out of egoistic ignorance and its works and results; to live in it is to acquire peace and firm spiritual foundation.

The way to bring about this great transformation followg a double path; for there is the way of knowledge